Devil's In the Details
by Indignant Lemur
Summary: The moment you think you know someone, you know nothing at all, and the things that should stay buried sometimes don't. WARNINGS: Coarse language, violence, gore, mature subject matter. TalaxOC.
1. 2:00 AM

Title: Devil's In The Details  
Summary: The moment you think you know someone, you know nothing at all.  
Characters:Tala, Ian, Spencer, Bryan, OC; TalaxOC pairing  
Warning(s): Course language, mature subject matter, possible graphic content (gore) later on.  
Genre(s): Horror, drama, romance

**EXPLANATION**: Okay, to avoid any further confusion... This is a series of drabbles, no single chapter exceeding 2k words, working in a chronological timeline just like any full-chapter story. Each chapter focuses on particular moments or events as time moves forward, rather than everyday details that perfectly sequenced, full-length chapters might do. That said, if you want to know what's going on, you can't jump from chapter one to chapter twenty to chapter eight. You're going to miss something.

Hope that clears a few things up!

* * *

**[2:00am]**

"Hold the door."

Yuriy didn't see the speaker at first, but obligingly jabbed the appropriate button in the old, worn panel. She stepped into the elevator a moment later –swaggered, really- and her dark jacket was covered in garish red maple leaves that caught the light and momentarily blinded him.

His migraine only worsened.

It was two in the morning, and, to fit in with the rest of his day, it's cold, wet, and miserable. He suspected tomorrow will be exactly the same. Today, he corrected himself.

He was returning from his night job, and she was a new face in the quiet apartment block, which stood seven stories high with six apartments per floor. They didn't speak to one another in the elevator, not a word during the thirty-second silence, and that was new. He expected an attempt to chat him up, or some half-hearted, misplaced attempt to befriend him, all full of awkward smiles and uncomfortable social niceties he has no time for.

She made no such move, however, and the silence was filled with the creaks and groans of machinery. He felt vaguely relieved.

When the too-cheery _bing!_ of the elevator heralded the opening of thick, metal sliding doors and the hallway on the other side is revealed, she stepped to the side, neatly, politely, and let him out first.

Good. Chivalry, he noted sourly, was thoroughly dead, a corpse of an ideal animated through the will of foppish romantics and smarmy bastards, and he really couldn't care less. The only thing on his mind right then was the dichotomy between vodka and aspirin.

That doesn't stop him from noticing that her apartment is directly opposite from the one he shared with his strange, makeshift family. The apartment across the hall had been unoccupied for years -and for a very good reason, some might say.


	2. Spark

**[Spark]**

He stepped onto the fifth floor of the apartment complex, backpack casually hanging from one shoulder, and keys in hand, and met only darkness; the light switch to his right flicked once, twice, three times, but the hallway remained dim. He could hear the voices of his roommates further down the hall, most likely near the maintenance room, low and coarse and laconic –and, faintly, a slightly higher, smoother, accented voice joined in, rapid, interrogative bursts of sound within the black.

The speaker, recognizable as female, was speaking English, with a very distinctive West Coast Canadian accent; slow-paced, with an abrupt and utterly bizarre emphasis on the r`s in words. It took him a few moments to understand what she was saying.

"Hello," The stranger's voice calls out, neither loud nor brazen, but painfully polite. Familiar, too. "Hang on a minute, I'm almost done fixing this mess. What the devil did that poor microwave ever do to you, Kuznetzov?"

"It _broke_." Answered the burly and ill-tempered Boris, and only a rock could have missed the menace in his tone. Yuriy didn't know what was more unusual –that the intruder was already chummy with at least one of his roommates, or that Boris hadn't killed her yet.

Still, at least Boris refrained from making a bloody mess; he was hardly in the mood to clean up after the man yet again.

"So you decided to break it some more, thereby causing a power outage?" The female voice inquired, sounding justifiably sceptical. "Lovin' the logic in that one..." –a spark in the darkness left purple and green echoes in his vision as he approached- "Ow_fuck_!"

"I thought you said you knew what you were doing?" Only Ivan could pull off such a nasally, accusatory tone while sneering, in either English or Russian. As Yuriy moved towards the maintenance room, he began to place his respective roommates as they spoke. Boris and Ivan were closest, standing ahead of him and to his left, which left Sergei unaccounted for. Given the bear of a man's preference for silence, this was not surprising.

He reached the section of the hallway just outside of the maintenance room and waited. His roommates already knew he was there. The malice radiated from Boris' general direction disappeared almost entirely upon his arrival. Good.

"She's not a technician –just picked the lock and started muddling around." Sergei's low baritone murmured to his right in Russian. Yuriy snorted. Typical.

"I do, thanks -I just hate being shocked. My mommy was an electrical engineer and my daddy was a thermodynamic engineer, so I picked up a few things." The female answered, her voice originating from somewhere around waist-level, over several clicks and rustling of cloth.

Yuriy didn't know what was worse, the fact that she actually said "mommy" and "daddy" or the fact that she probably had no idea what she was doing.

"Yeah?" Ivan asked, not because he was interested, but because he probably had nothing better to do –not until the power came back on, anyways. "And what are you?"

"I'm studying psychology." The girl answered, and there was a note of amusement in her voice. Ivan snorted. "Yeah, I don't know how that happened either."

There was another spark, a flash, and then the low hum of fluorescent lights filled the hall. Two doors down, someone let out a triumphant shout. "Here we go..."

The bulbs above gave a series of spastic flickerflickerflickers, and then-

"My eyes! Give a guy some warning next time, will you?"

No longer obscured by darkness, girl hovered by a panel affixed to the wall within the maintenance room, her back facing him. She turned, subconsciously tossing her hair over her shoulder, and stood akimbo with a frown.

Yuriy's first thought was that she wore far too much makeup; that mess around her eyes made them look too small.

His second was that she looked too damn girly to know her way around a fuse box. She looked like the type you'd find walking annoying little Shih Tzu's in four inch heels during a blizzard; vaguely pretty, but not too bright. No accounting for taste, either.

"I do you a favour and I get nothing but complaints!" The girl blurted out angrily, exasperation edging her sharp tone. "_Hell_, see if I help you again!"

This outburst was followed by some of the most creative curses he'd ever heard involving Ivan's mother, a yak, and a roll of Swiss cheese. As abruptly as the tirade began, it ended, and she stormed out of the tiny maintenance room, leaving the heavy oak door ajar with a pair of hair pins still jammed into the lock, all self-righteous high-heeled boots, swagger and low-cut jeans.

Ivan pointed at the girl's retreating form and looked Yuriy right in the eye.

"_Marry_ that girl."

Boris scoffed.


	3. Sky

**[Sky]**

She stumbled into the elevator, looking for all the world like a drowned raccoon; her makeup ran down her face in watery black streaks, her clothes soaked through and clinging to her skin, and her teeth chattering.

Sergei observed the girl wordlessly, taking stock of her pallor and downcast eyes, the way she wrapped her arms around her torso. He was not particularly moved by her misery or discomfort. One days like today when the sky seemed intent on drowning everyone and anyone, _everyone_ was miserable and uncomfortable.

Still, she was polite. Even now, she nodded politely, asked him how he was despite her teeth-chattering stutter. She'd done so for the better part of the last three months; Ivan was the only one who would answer with more than a nod or a grunt so far.

Today, however, there was something lacking in her demeanour...

The elevator doors slid open and they went their separate ways.


	4. Lost Scene

**[Lost Scene]**

"Hey, remember that girl who moved in last month? The Canadian girl?"

"The one who lives across from Valkovich and his lot? Da. Why?"

"Have you seen her at all? I saw her once -maybe twice- the first week she moved in, and then nothing. _Poof_! She just _disappeared_! Does that sound normal to you, Lukyankovich?"

"Come to think of it, no –and before you say it, those boys haven't gone and off'd the girl. They're not nearly as bad as you and the others make them out to be. They don't cause any trouble and keep to themselves –what more do you want, eh? Besides, maybe the Canadian's just busy –Margarit said she was a student, da? Studies psychopaths or something like that, doesn't she?"

"Psychology, and I still don't like it."

"Bah! You just like your conspiracy theories, Pavlov."

Silently, Ivan slipped away from the nattering old men, unseen and unnoticed.


	5. Degrees

**[Degrees]**

"Uh huh... Chromium supplements? For what? ...Seriously?"

The voice, speaking in English for a change, comes from behind him as he turns the key in the lock and steps into his apartment. He catches the rest of the conversation as she steps over to her door and fumbles awkwardly with her keys.

"Oh, sweetheart, chromium only speeds up your metabolism at four hundred degrees Celsius; you've been scammed. No, I'm not joking, kiddo –I'm the one who aces chemistry for _fun_, remember? Yep. Uh-huh. Sorry, sis, if you want to lose weight, you'll have to do it the good old fashioned way. Yeah, yeah, love you, too. Bye."

She notices him finally, just as she's about to step inside. She offers a small smile, and says, "Dobraye utra, Valkovich. Kak dela?"

He nods, grunts, and she smiles as though he's spoken a full sentence to her before disappearing into her apartment.

He thinks about what he'd overheard, considers that perhaps she's smarter than he gave her credit for.

... She _still_ looks like she should be toting around a goddamn Shih Tzu.

* * *

Russian Translations:

1. Dobraye utra: Good morning  
2. Kak dela: How are you?


	6. Seize The Day

**[Seize The Day]**

She hadn't left her apartment to do more than basic things like grabbing some groceries in about a month. Not even to go to class. Her friends emailed her the lecture notes.

Not one of them asked why she wasn't there. Not a damn one.

She stares at the pamphlets in her hands, all brightly coloured and avoiding words like "disease" and "syndrome" with neat little substitutes like "situation" and "condition" and worse. It was sickening. All of the booklets were filled with pictures of women -women holding hands, women hugging, women with children, women smiling and looking happy and carefree.

Women supposedly as defective as she was.

That was really the only word for it, if she thought about it. She wasn't dying, she wasn't wasting away from some degenerative disease; really, she had nothing to be sad about. It could have been worse –at one point, the doctor had been looking for cancer. She shouldn't be sad, she thought, she didn't have it so bad. It was just...

She was defective –born that way, actually. Born with a "string of pearls" in her ovaries and a hormone imbalance that left her with horrible systemic acne that used to leave scars on her face, back, arms, and chest before she got antibiotics to suppress it. She'd avoided the hirsuitism through sheer luck, and the more severe weight problems, too.

Oh, sure, she should probably drop five or six (twenty) pounds, but who shouldn't these days? It wasn't too bad, anyway.

And, yeah, it was a gateway disease –like how marijuana was a gateway drug for things like meth and cocaine- but she could probably avoid the diabetes and heart disease and all that by watching her diet and exercising. Not a big change, she realized; she did that already...

But... she probably couldn't have kids. Not naturally, not without drugs or in vitro fertilization, not without an increased risk of miscarriage.

Not without potentially passing her little defect along.

She snorted. _Her little defect_. What was it, a _pet_?

So there she was, sitting at her kitchen table –slumped, really- staring at colourful, pointless pamphlets that told her that she was _okay_ and that she _wasn't alone_ and that she could also reach out for _support_. She took one look at the pretty, smiling women holding hands with their pretty, smiling children, and knew with a foreign sense of finality that that would never be her.

The thought left her strangely cold, and, yet, at the same time, it didn't. She hadn't _wanted_ kids, per se, but she'd sort of figured, in that vague kind of way that people do when they don't plan too much for the future, that she'd have them eventually. Maybe one or two, with her curly ginger hair, or maybe her eyes. When she was bored, she used to hope they wouldn't get her nose –thin with tapered nostrils and not quite hooked, but definitely a little bent- because she always hated her nose, and...

And she was distracting herself, separating herself from the problem. She knew herself well enough to know when her mind was trying to hide from something.

She sighed, cleared her throat awkwardly, because she was so alone in her apartment and sometimes it felt like a bubble of silence and stagnation in a booming, pulsing world. She tossed the booklets onto the table carelessly, and stared at her hands. She wet her lips. Breathed. Formed the words in her mind. Mentally shaped her lips to make the sounds.

Spoke.

"PCOS. Polycystic Ovaries Syndrome." There it was, out for the tiny bubble of nothing in the world that was her apartment to hear. She paused and took in the moment.

Well, _hell_, if that didn't feel like a nail in the coffin, she didn't know what di-

The sudden _THUMPTHUMPTHUMP!_ on her front door caught her in mid-thought, startled her in to letting out an undignified yelp. It took her a minute to decipher the English from the other side of the oak barrier, so used to listening to guttural Russian as she was. Hearing her native tongue was a little jarring.

"Oi, girl! You alive in there? We're breaking out a bottle of vodka! Get over here! The neighbours think we've gone and killed you." Ivan –he was the one with the nasally voice, she remembered- shouted in English, his Slavic accent playing hell with his vowels.

Russian, she though, was a strange language. It dragged out the i's like they were double-e's, switching out the w's for v's, and rolling the r's like a purring cat. Sporadically, the "th" in a word would sound more like a Z, and some of the words that ended in "ing" seemed to have an extra K at the end. It was, as she reaffirmed, a strange language, fluid and rolling like white-water rapids, and English was so abrupt and disjointed, like rocks jutting out of the water for you to crash against; the transition was always difficult.

...And she was distracting herself again.

She hadn't really and truly left this box of a home in a month. She needed to get out, even if it was just across the hall. Why not take up the offer, seize the opportunity to socialize for a few hours, to just pretend to be normal and fine?

She stood, wincing as the scraping of the chair against the floor cut through the thick silence of her kitchen, and padded over to the door, raking her fingers through her hair more out of habit than any particular need to be presentable.

"Listen, if you're not interested, just damn well say so! I'm not about to stand out here all damn ni-" The door opened, and Ivan stopped in mid-tirade.

"Hey."


	7. Opposite

**[Opposite]**

"So, now that we've lured you out of your lair with the faint promise of alcohol..." Ivan began, and she thought that that was possibly the longest sentence he'd ever spoken to her. She wasn't sure if that was a bad thing or not, but she appreciated the fact that he spoke English –it was nice to hear her mother tongue now and then.

They were sitting around the living area of his apartment, the surly one –Boris Kuznetzov- was in the kitchen with his own (commandeered) bottle of vodka and a shot glass, while Ivan Petrovich and the bear –Sergei Ivanovich- flanked her on either side of the couch. The redhead with the white-blue eyes sat opposite of her in an armchair... and they were all watching her. She felt not unlike a mouse caught out on open ground when a hawk flew overheard.

It was quiet possibly the most awkward position she'd ever put herself in, she decided, but the alcohol she swivelled around in her glass was not unwelcome. Hell, human contact wasn't too painful, either.

She nodded, encouraging the shorter man to continue. Ivan didn't need it; he was the most talkative of the four men by far –not that that was saying much. They were all so... _different_ from what she was used to. So reserved and cold and distant, not like her friends back home in Canada.

"... What the hell's your name, anyvay? Everyone around here just calls you The Canadian and insists that ve've gone and murdered you in your sleep." He wanted to know.

She snorted at that -she was alive and well... mostly- but conceded that she had never really introduced herself. "Jayda. Jayda Anderson."

The rest of the night was quiet, with only intermittent, short-lived conversations that felt more like cleverly disguised interrogations breaking the silence, and the quiet hum of the news in the background. In short, it was awkward as hell.

Fortunately, there was a lot of booze, and everyone knows that booze fixes everything –if only temporarily.

Somewhere along the way, she'd gotten chatty, as Jayda was wont to do when tipsy, and had struck up a conversation with Sergei about tanks and tank engines. The bear of a man seemed surprised that she actually knew anything about tanks –her daddy was in the army for a while there, she explained- and, amazingly, no one teased her for saying "daddy" as she expected they would. The conversation rapidly turned into a debate on weapons in general, and then onto military tactics, and she was pleasantly surprised by the man's depth of knowledge in each of the subjects. Now and then one of the other men would contribute –usually a curt comment about one tank model's failings, or a major flaw in a strategy- and after that things felt... not relaxed, but marginally less tense, at least.

At least the neighbours would stop wondering if she was dead now; all four of the other tenants of the fifth floor had poked their heads out of their apartments to watch for her appearance when Ivan had started hammering on her door. Like Meer cats.

Vultures.

The next morning, she woke up with the mother of all hangovers and the vague impression that she maybe might have made a sort-of-kind-of friend or two.

At least, she thought she might have. Her memory was a little fuzzy on that part.


	8. Passions Run

**[Passions Run]**

The lounges on each floor were a new idea that the landlord had come up with –common areas where the various tenants could hang out, watch hockey games or what have you, and socialize. They were comfortable enough –chairs, couches, table, and TV. Comfortable enough that Jayda had decided to work on her literature project with her partner in the common room; anything to get out of her apartment for a bit.

Things had been going well. Jayda and her partner, a pretty blue-eyed blonde by the unfortunate name of Nastya, had made a lot of progress, and had slipped into an easy conversation about one of the authors they were answering questions about.

"_Effeminate_? And vhat makes a guy effeminate? _Society_! _Sexist_, _conservative_ society dominated solely by men!"

And that, Jayda thought, was the exact point at which their conversation went horribly, horribly wrong.

The Canadian had made the teeny tiny mistake of maybe inferring that aforementioned author was rather feminine, not in his writing –certainly not- but in personality and, well... As Jayda had discovered mere moments afterward, Nastya was a hardcore feminist.

Jayda couldn't remember the last time she'd backpeddled quite so hard.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I misspoke! I _meant_-" The Canadian girl stumbled, becoming acutely aware of the red in Nastya's face and eyeing the rapidly pulsing vein at the other girl's temple...

That didn't work very well. Instead of calming down, Nastya let loose a flurry of angry Russian so quickly that Jayda couldn't quite understand what the blonde had said but was left with the distinct impression that she'd been insulted. She did, however, catch the very end of the tirade.

"You're not nearly feminist enough! Your poor kids are going to grow up believing that men are smarter and stronger because _you _don't have half the spine you should and you've been brainwashed by the patriar-"

Jayda stopped listening after that, a single word echoing in her mind, over and over and over again.

Kids.

Kids.

_Kids._

Kids she'd likely _never have_.

_Christ_.

She just had to bring up _kids_.

Something twisted, pulled too hard, too tight, deep inside her chest, like her heart had stuttered and her lungs were stuffed with cotton and it _hurt_ and she couldn't _breathe _and, damn it, she wasn't going to _cry_ again!

Jayda squeezed her eyes shut and grit her teeth as her sinuses stung and her fists clenched, and she thought for a second that she might cry, because her eyes watered a little and she felt that characteristic downwards tug at the corners of the lips and then...

And then...

And then she just felt _angry_. Angry, because, goddamn it, she had enough problems as it was and she didn't have to put up with Nastya's self-righteous ranting on top of everything else, and Jayda was tired of crying, and _damn _Nastya for bringing up _kids_.

Grey eyes opened, fixed the blue-eyed blonde with a flat, reptilian stare, and the words, calm and even, edged with too much sugar, tasted like battery acid and honey on her tongue. "_Get the fuck out_."

"Vhat?"

"Get out."

"Just because you don't agree-"

"I will not repeat myself again."

Nastya the pretty blonde feminist left, and the room was silent, and Jayda was alone –or so she had believed. As she clasped her hands together and rested her forehead against her interwoven fingers, a voice cut through the quiet from behind, straightening her spine and taking the breath from her very lungs.

"You are _nekulturny_, Canadian."

She fought down the sudden, irrational impulse to flee, to run back to her dark little apartment and hide as she recognized the voice and the insult. In Russia, to be _nekulturny_ was to be uncultured, uncivilized; it was one of the most offensive things you could say to a person, and the word made her flinch, made her hiss as she inhaled sharply. She wanted to flee, to hide her rapidly reddening face in shame, because she had been _nekulturny, _but no. No. She'd done enough running recently.

Instead, she stilled her jumpy nerves, controlled her muscles, and answered the insult with forced calmness, "Valkovich, I have a very good reason for my behav-"

She might as well have stayed silent; he didn't acknowledge her response at all.

"Then again, so vas _she_. Perhaps it vas deserved." The redheaded Russian at her back interrupted her, an unidentifiable lilt colouring his tone.

Jayda spun around, an expression of disbelief on her face, only to catch a flash of red hair before the painted door to the lounge closed.

There was something decidedly _different_ about those guys, she thought to herself.


	9. Connection

**[Connection]**

She eyed the door dubiously, wondering if the chair would hold against the human battering rams on the other side; the chain and deadbolts hadn't looked like they'd hold for very long. Sitting in the kitchen with a mug of tea in her hands, the voice of the reporter on six o' clock news valiantly soldiering on over the enraged shrieking beyond the flimsy door, –something about a series of mysterious murders and suspicions of a serial killer- Jayda wondered how she got herself into these situations.

"Huh. They usually leave after an hour or so." Ivan says abruptly as he tinkers some contraption involving chemicals, test tubes, and something that looks suspiciously like the casing of a flash-bang grenade. Jayda figured that might have been an apology, but, then again, maybe not; it was hard to tell sometimes.

"It probably didn't help that you ran into my apartment." She pointed out, and she took a moment to wonder why they always spoke English around her. Her Russian was fluent enough, her accent a little thick, yeah, but comprehensible... Jayda shrugged inwardly. Oh well.

"We did not _run_."

"All right. Upon sighting your rabid fan girls from days of first-year-university-yore, you executed a tactical retreat with great speed and little stealth directly into my living space -in plain sight, thereby drawing the horde to my front door. You have since hunkered down and dug in for the night for all intents and purposes... Feel free to help yourself to whatever's in the fridge." Jayda tried again with a wry smile. Ivan rolled his eyes and returned to tinkering.

The Canadian watched silently as he adjusted the ratio of some of the chemicals, and wondered if she'd need to replace her table when the strange bunch currently occupying her apartment left. She swore he was making a flash-bang grenade. It _looked_ like a flash-bang, at least. He could have been making an honest to God grenade, though. She wasn't too clear on the manufacturing differences between the two.

...Maybe she should look into that.

"Okay, I have to ask." Jayda stopped abruptly, feeling four sets of eyes on her all at once. Yuriy, sitting across from her, raised an eyebrow. She couldn't see what Boris and Sergei were doing over in the living area, but she could feel two sets of holes burning into her back.

The Canadian couldn't help but notice that every single time she was around the four Russians from across the hall, she always, always, _always _managed to blunder into an awkward, throat-closing silence. The kind that make you want to cringe and maybe hide under the table for a bit until people forgot you were there. She almost dropped the subject, unable to stand the discomfiture of it all, but Ivan was playing with those chemicals again and fear for her poor, abused table drove her onwards.

"... Are you making a flash-bang grenade?"

Ivan grinned.


	10. Lull

**[Lull]**

If nothing else, Yuriy had near-perfect dominance over his roommates. It was a little strange, but none of the neighbours could complain –Boris was a wildcard, given to violence at the slightest provocation, and Ivan had too much of a fondness for explosions. Sergei alone was the only one who didn't need to be controlled. On the surface that is. While not physically destructive, Sergei was manipulative –devastatingly so. Jayda had not experienced any of this herself, but her neighbour Margit was all too eager to regale her with _witch's warnings_ about the three. There had been previous tenants, Margit would begin... And then she'd trail off, and look around, as though she were expecting a member of the silent quartet to appear out of thin air.

Jayda was pretty sure Margit was batshit insane, but she couldn't bring herself to break the old lady's heart by telling her as much.

Regardless, according to Margit, the redheaded man kept them under control, kept them out of trouble. Margit assured the Canadian, as if this was a comforting thought, that they hadn't had any problems in months now.

It wasn't until her other -clearly sane- neighbour repeated a few of Margit's stories that Jayda began to give then any credence, but even then she was dubious. The four had been stoic, certainly, and reclusive, but she had never witnessed any violence on their end. Sure, Ivan built that one flash-bang grenade in her kitchen, but he never _did_ anything with it –not that she knew of, anyway. And yeah, Boris was a little grumpy, but that just seemed to be his natural state of being. Sergei... well, Sergei didn't talk, so she couldn't really form an opinion of him.

Admittedly, all she really knew was the Ivan tolerated her, Boris couldn't give a damn either way, and Sergei didn't talk. Except that one time when she was a bit tipsy, but so far that was the only time Sergei had ever actually spoken to her, much less had a conversation. Yuriy, though... Yuriy made no friggin' sense. One minute he was insulting her, the next he was having coffee with her.

Still... now that the seed had been planted, Jayda had started to notice things about her not-really-friends across the hall. Whenever one of them started to step over some line, if Yuriy said the word, they all but jumped back into place, like soldiers when their sergeant's pissed...

Currently, she was sitting in the common room, empty but for herself and her silent companion, each nursing a cup of coffee, each watching the other. As grey eyes met white-blue ones, the girl –woman, she should say, but she's always felt like a girl on the inside- silently wondered what hold he had over them.


	11. Storm

**[Storm]**

She wore a teal ribbon on a necklace now, and it was a stark contrast to the black and red of her rather patriotic outerwear. When she wasn't wearing her jacket, she transferred it to whatever she was currently wearing. She wondered how many people knew what it meant. It stood for a lot of things, of course –gynaecological cancers, sexual assault, substance abuse, and so on- but she wondered how many guessed right.

One hour into her first date with Andreyev, she figured not too many did.

It had started off well enough. Andreyev was a decent guy, she'd thought when she met him, and he was comfortable to be around. He was polite, charming, and funny. He liked her –liked her warped sense of humour, even- and he _really_ liked her dress when they went out for dinner earlier that evening. It was a sea green, low-cut satin halter, knee-length and split at the knee on one side -damned if she didn't know she looked good in it.

Unfortunately, just as he brought her back to her apartment –all the way up to her door, even, the gentleman- she discovered that he also _really_ liked the idea of her dress on the floor.

Naturally enough, Jayda had told him to back off; she'd just met him, for Christ's sake, and have some sense of decorum!

He'd pointed at the ribbon and said, to her overwhelming disbelief and horror, "Why not? You were raped, weren't you? You know how this works."

_Yeah_... Andreyev wasn't such a _decent_ guy after all.

And then he was backing her up into the front door of her apartment and his mouth was on hers –toorough- and his arm was crushing her against him –can't breathe- and there were going to be bruises on her wrist where his hand squeezed and then she was pinned and the one hand roved while the other hand squeezed –bones _this_close to - and there was nowhere to go and she couldn't _breathe_, damn it, and he tasted like the steak and wine he'd had for dinner and she felt _sick_ and-

And there it was again; _anger_. It was the same as with Nastya.

No. Worse than with Nastya. So much _worse_.

For the life of her, she'd never remember how she got out of his grip –some crazy feat of adrenaline, she'd decide later on- but she's always, _always_ remember the crunch of bone and cartilage under her fist as she broke his nose and fled.

He hadn't expected to be punched in the face by a supposed-rape victim, from the look on his face, she thought, sliding the deadbolts home, putting as much distance between herself and the man on the other side of that door. Nor, she thought numbly, had he ever expected to have a door slammed into his already quite broken nose.

The adrenaline had lasting only as long as it had been needed, and already her hands were shaking. At least, that's what she told herself.

_Goddamn_, she sure could pick 'em. Why couldn't she find a _nice_guy? Why? Was something _wrong_ with her?

_Hell_.

The lights flickered. Once, twice... three times.

Then they disappeared completely.

Andreyev swore, held one hand to his nose, the other outstretched to pat at the wall while he tried to navigate towards the elevator. He grumbled and cursed about uppity bitches and vague promises of revenge, too loud to hear the footsteps from behind.

The man hadn't expected to be sucker-punched in the face, certainly, but he could never have been prepared for the gloved hand over his mouth, the arm around his throat. Stunned, night-blind eyes already blurry from tears of pain, nose blocked with blood and collapsed pathways, he struggled to breathe, to break away, shouting muffled curses, because _damn it_ his night had already gone awry, but the grip was as iron and the world, black and undefined as it was, began to spin, and there was a sharp prick in his neck, like a bug bite and _what the hell was going on_?

All too quickly he was dragged down the dark, spinning, wobbling hall, into the dimly lit stairwell that no one used –it was under construction, Jayda, that bitch, had told him earlier- and thrown bodily down the stairs. He fell, landed badly on his arm on the sharp edges of concrete steps, again and again and again, and when his momentum finally, finally stopped, he saw a tall, thin man with empty eyes.


	12. Animal

**[Animal]**

_"...Police found the remains of Andreyev Kozlov, who is known to police, earlier this morning, dismembered and arranged in a ritual manner eerily similar to that of another unsolved murder committed six years ago. Investigators have identified the last person to see Kozlov alive, but have stated that this person is not a suspect. Kozlov does not have a criminal record, but there have been six cases dropped charges of sexual assault against him..."_

Jayda was in the common room again, watching the report on the TV screen and _trying_ to feel some remorse for Andreyev's murder –really _trying_- but she couldn't. Instead, there was only a grim sense of satisfaction.

Her wrist, as she'd predicted, had bruised a lovely hand-shaped purple colour, and her knuckles were a little scratched up. In her hand, the one with the bloodied knuckles, the phone number of the lead investigator on a business card. _Just in case_. Just in case _what_? She had an epiphany? She had a psychic vision about that bastard's murderer? What_ever_.

Jayda rubbed at her bare, mottled wrist absent-mindedly. She did not hide the marks of a night gone wrong, did not cover her arms with long sleeves and quietly bandage her hand. Why should she? Why should she feel ashamed for something that bastard did? She'd fought back. What's more, she'd _won_. The bruise and cuts? They were _trophies_.

"That looks like it hurt." The familiar drawl of her sometimes silent companion interrupted her musings, and a mug of coffee was held right up in her face, only half an inch from the tip of her nose.

To most, that might seem rude. Jayda figured it was just his way of offering things.

"Thanks." She said, taking the mug out of his hand, and she watched out of her peripherals as he sat opposite of her at the little table.

"You didn't answer me."

"Technically, you didn't ask anything."


	13. Missing Time

**[Missing Time]**

A week had passed since that first date gone horribly awry. The bruise had finally started to fade into mottled reds, greens and yellows, and the scrapes on her knuckles had almost completely healed. Most of the neighbours had finally stopped staring and murmuring to one another, too, which was nice. It would have been nicer if they'd just minded their own damn business, she thought, but it was still nice.

She hadn't seen much of her sort-of-not-really friends from across the hall recently which was... well, it wasn't unusual for them, but it still struck her as a little weird. Usually Ivan was around, at least, but not this time. She occasionally heard movement from behind their front door when she walked by, which was the only indication she had that the quartet hadn't just dropped off of the face of the earth, but that was about it.

It was... weird. She couldn't really explain it. It was more of a gut feeling than anything else. Well, either that, or she'd had bad sushi that afternoon with Sasha and Kayla. That wouldn't have surprised her –that restaurant _had _looked a little sketchy.

Still, she kind of missed them. Not in the way that you miss your family when you move out, but... She guessed it felt more like how you'd feel a little _off_ when something in your routine changes out of the blue. Like something's missing, or you've skipped a step by mistake and something's not adding up right.

... She'd _kind of_ gotten used to having coffee with Yuriy in the lounge every now and then, and now that had _kind of_ become a fixture in her weekday-life. So it _kind of_ sucked that he wasn't around much lately.

That man made the most fantastic coffee she had ever tasted.


	14. Fight or Flight

**[Fight/Flight] **

Jayda knew her luck was a little finicky –everyone's was- but there comes a point in everyone's lives when something happens and one finds oneself looking up at the ceiling and shouting, "Oh, come _on_!"

... Which is precisely what Jayda did when the men and women in suits and slacks, armed with microphones and camera men and tape recorders, started spilling out of the elevator, like friggin' locusts and frogs upon the Egypt that was the fifth floor hallway.

The reporters had found her.

"Miss Anderson! Miss Anderson! You were the last person to see Andreyev Kozlov alive –do you have any comments about his death?" Someone within the horde called, speaking with the local Moscow accent. Jayda started fumbling with her keys, thanking every deity she could think of –and making some up along the way- that she was at the opposite end of the hall from the elevator.

God, she didn't want to _talk_ to these people! What the hell did they _want_? She knew Kozlov for all of one hour outside of her biology class, and it wasn't even an hour worth remembering! Why wouldn't they leave her alone?

Fifteen feet. Not that that meant much –the vultures were approaching rapidly.

First they'd all but mugged her in the street, then they hovered around on campus –her professor asked her to _leave_ so that the reporters would stop disrupting the class, for god's sake! Do they realize how humiliating that is? Do they? _Goddamn_- and now they'd followed her into her apartment complex. That _had_ to be harassment, damn it!

Ten feet.

Bugger! She'd dropped her keys! Kneeling and swiping the cluttered key ring from the floor, she went back to desperately fumbling for the right key.

"Were you involved with Andrevey Kozlov prior to his murder?" Whoever that lady was, she was from out of town; she spoke with a regional accent Jayda hadn't heard before.

Five feet. Focus! Focus!

_No time!_

"Were you dating him, Miss Anderson?" Another Moscow resident, this one male, wanted to know.

"Are you pregnant?" A woman with a nasally voice shouted from the back. Jayda couldn't quite stop the expression of horror that flitted over her face, and it sent them into a frenzy.

'You must be _joking_!' Something hysterical shrieked in the back of her mind, and her mind flashed back to wine and steak and _tooroughtooroughcan'tbreathecan'tbreathecan'tbreathecan't-_

An arm hooked around her waist from behind –she might have screamed- and in that tiny sliver of time between one moment and the next, she was dragged from the hallway –she might have struggled- into the apartment directly behind her, her back flush against the front of her sort-of-not-quite-friend-saviour-kidnapper. She wasn't sure which sort-of-not-quite-friend it was.

The door slammed shut, the interrogatives and interrogations muffled on the other side of two inches of oak. As fists started banging on the door, muffled shouts getting louder and clearer and more and more reminiscent of crows, an arm appeared in her line of vision, sliding deadbolt lock home and putting the chain in place. Her knees might have given out a little with the tidal wave of relief that hit her, but if they did, she didn't notice; her mind was focusing on her rapid heartbeat and the way the world spun a little too much.

_Saved_.

"You can stop clinging now, _zayatz_." A voice murmured in her ear, and she'd never been happier to hear that familiar drawl.

Abruptly, Jayda realized that she had a death grip on the poor man's arm and let go as if burned. She mumbled an apology, felt her face burn a little, and stood, peeling away from her saviour-kidnapper. She turned, opening her mouth to thank Yuriy, and then stopped, because no one was there. He was gone and the apartment was eerily dark, curtains drawn against the midday sun. She hadn't even heard them move... Moreover, she didn't think the others were in; she probably would have heard them by now if they were.

Tentatively, she moved a little further into the apartment, "... Valkovich?"

"Wait here. They will leave soon enough." The redheaded man's voice came from a room to her left, the door ajar, and the contents within smothered by darkness. Despite that, she felt his eyes on her, and the hairs on the back of her neck tingled -not quite standing on end, but definitely thinking about it.

"... Thanks." She told the dark room. She didn't get a response. The weight of eyes still lingered.

Deciding there was nothing for it now, -like hell she was going back out _there_- she took her shoes and jacket off, set her purse down, and took a seat on the couch.

And waited.

* * *

**Russian Translations:**

Zayatz: Rabbit or hare.


	15. Linger

**[Linger] **

When she awoke, she was lying on a couch, her head pillowed by her arm, momentarily disoriented, she gave a start, stopping only a fraction of a second later when she remembered she was with Yuriy –not that she knew where Yuriy was. The apartment had gone from dim to pitch black in that blur between her sitting on the couch and waking up on it.

Her night vision sucked.

Jayda yawned involuntarily, feeling groggy and dishevelled, looked around for some indication of what time it was. She couldn't see any digital clocks, and analogs were useless in the dark...

"Eleven." Yuriy's voice came from the dark, uncanny and accurate as always, and she thought the voice came from directly in front of the couch.

Jayda jumped, partly because she hadn't known someone was even there, and partly because she hadn't known that someone was standing _that_ close. She felt eyes on her, like when she was in class and the other students would watch her like they would watch a bug under a magnifying glass, only worse because it was more than a little disconcerting to have someone staring at you when you didn't know where exactly they were.

Eight hours. She'd fallen asleep and commandeered the man's couch for eight hours. Fantastic. He probably thought she was _nekulturny_ again.

She inhaled slowly, suppressing a yawn, and ran a hand through her thoroughly mussed hair. She wondered if her makeup was smudged all over her face, or if she looked vaguely presentable. Then she wondered why she was wondering about looking presentable.


	16. Duty

**[Duty]**

The voice of the reporter, prim and sociopathic in its apathy, reached his ears through the doorway as he prepared for his rounds. _"...a rash of murders has been committed around the city, but we are still awaiting details. Anya, have you heard anything about what happened? Are the police releasing any information at all?"_

A younger woman, less jaded, less formal, answered, _"Yes, Margaret, we have. Two weeks after the bodies of sixteen women were discovered in a meat locker just outside of Moscow, the police released a statement..."_

A man's voice, deep and rough –a recording, from the background noise. _"...all victims were adults, the youngest being twenty and the oldest around twenty-nine, with red or blonde hair..."_

The gory details continued, and his interest was piqued. He headed over to the living room, where Boris, Sergei and Ivan all watched the report with varying degrees of concern on their faces.

Anya was onscreen again, a plain-looking thing with doe-eyes and dull hair._"That's right, Margaret. The chief of police refused to comment, but the coroner who performed the autopsies claims that all sixteen of the women, killed days apart, suffered severe lacerations, broken bones, and internal bleeding. The cause of death in each case appears to have been an injection of a poison, though exactly what the poison was we haven't been told. Again, the chief of police refused to comment, but an officer assigned to the case told me that he believes that they're dealing with a rapidly escalating serial killer."_

The chief of police won't be pleased with the coroner, Yuriy mused to himself irrelevantly.

Ivan turned the report off. Silence filled the room.

"Shit, Yuriy, was that-?" The question was spoken rapidly in their mother tongue, and all three men were staring at him.

"No."

They look relieved.

It was the wrong modus operandi entirely; they already knew that, he understood, but they had been compelled –irrationally, he thought- to ask. It was... normal to ask, he supposed.

"I will look into this." He told them.

And he would; he had a vested interest in making this misogynist murderer disappear.


	17. Chess

**[Chess]**

He found her in the lounge again, slouched in a chair at a table barely visible under the mess of papers and textbooks. With one hand, she was massaging the bridge of her nose, while the other turned the page of the largest textbook. She glanced up at him when she heard the door open, offered a strained smile. There were black smudges under her eyes.

"Do yourself a favour..." She greeted him miserably. She leaned back in her chair, raising both hands to rub ineffectually at her temples. "Don't get into criminal psychology; the final is enough to make your head explode." She winced suddenly, and then mumbled, "Or implode. I can't tell yet."

He glanced down at her textbook, opened to a chapter proclaiming, "_SERIAL KILLERS: WHO KILLS, AND WHY?_" followed by a number of graphs illustrating various statistics on race, age, gender, and motives. The page after it was covered by a loose-leaf booklet, stapled neatly in the corner, with a title indicating that it contained practice questions. Interesting...

"I'm going insane..." She mumbled abruptly, in English, and he wondered if she realized that she did all of the talking during most of these little interludes. She slipped in and out of Russian often as well, likely without realizing it. Stress, perhaps? "I'm trying to answer this one question and I can't find anything on it. Something about a serial killer's possible endgame..."

Wordlessly, he offered her a mug of coffee.

"Thanks, Valkovich. I owe you a beer." The Canadian promised, switching back to Russian unconsciously, only pausing in her attempt to alleviate her headache to accept the mug. He wondered why people thought that rubbing their heads and looking miserable would help a headache when taking a tablet was so much easier -and effective.

"There isn't one." He answered her question for her in her native tongue, and she stared at him for a minute, fatigued brain trying to connect his words with something relevant. "Most serial killers don't plan on being caught before they're finished."

She caught on quickly enough. "Okay... But they're never finished..."

"_Nyet_."

She watched him with an odd expression on her face, and he wondered what she saw.

The expression slipped away a moment later, and she offered another smile -a real one, he noted- as she wrote down the answer. "Thanks."


	18. Rip

**[Rip]**

"That's it! I'm _done_! I can't put up with this shit anymore!"

It was not difficult to imagine why the residence of the fifth floor poked their heads out of their apartments to see what the ruckus was all about. It had quickly become apparent that the redhead from Canada was, as old Margit put it, 'unlucky in love' and the girl's nights out never failed to end in drama and entertainment for all.

Well, except for Jayda.

Poor, poor Jayda, Margit thought with some sympathy. It was such a shame that the poor girl couldn't find a _nice_ boy to settle down with. All the ones that followed her home –usually trying to smooth-talk their way out of something- were... less than reputable gentlemen friends, as it were.

Still, Margit wasn't going to turn down a free fashion show and soap opera.

Watching Jayda approach, storming out of the elevator with some new boyfriend on her heels, Margit wished she was young and thin again. Today, Jayda had gone for a more casual look –dark low cut jeans, stilleto heels, a swishy orange halter top, gold bangles and big earrings. Margit assumed, correctly, that tonight had been a Nightclub Night, tittering quietly behind her hand. Nightclub Nights, as she had dubbed them, were always interesting; Jayda picked up _all kinds_ of people on Nightclub Nights, whether she wanted to or not. Most of them were quite handsome, and Margit _never_ missed a good show.

Tonight's Source of Amusement and Agitation was a truly stunning fellow, Margit thought, all lean muscle and big, charming hazel eyes above an easy smile. Well, he might have had an easy smile; Margit wasn't too sure at the moment–the poor young man was too busy chasing after the Canadian apologizing for something. Not unusual, but the silly boy could have at least been kind enough to an old (bored) woman and stuck to Russian while he was at it. Margit was an old bird –so she thought, anyway- and she had never quite gotten the hang of English. Still, it was hard not to get the gist of things.

Jayda stuck with Russian, which made things all the more entertaining for the little old woman. Idly, Margit wondered if she would have enough time to make some popcorn if she left now. Probably not, she decided, eying the couple from her doorway. The old woman rather thought today's show as going to be a short one.

"This is ridiculous! This happens to me _every_-_goddamn_-_time_!" Bangles and earrings _clinked _together as Jayda threw her arms in the air, both expressing exasperation and dislodging the young fellow's beseeching hand from her forearm. "I can't _date_ people! I can't! I'm going to become a hermit and die alone, damn it –and don't you start arguing with me Karl! You have _no right_ to talk to me after that stunt you pulled!"

Jayda was fishing for her keys in her purse, a vicious scowl on her face, and her gentleman friend was looking more and more distressed. The young man, Karl, finally switched back to Russian, which made Margit's well-meant snooping a little easier. "Jayda, please, I'm sorry! I didn't-"

"_Don't say it_!" The redhead turned on Karl so fast, Margit was certain the poor girl was going to have whiplash. "You knew _exactly_ what you were doing! If you prefer table-dancing whores, _fine_, but at least have the common decency to break up with me first, you _prick_!"

Hmm. Margit frowned, her old, weathered face crinkling. Perhaps Jayda's gentleman friend was not such a gentleman after all. Pity, really. Jayda was a sweet girl –just like Margit's granddaughter, Alexia. It really _was_ a shame that the Canadian couldn't find a nice young fellow.

"_Again_?" A low, nasally voice asked from behind Margit. The old woman jumped, startled, and turned to see Ivan Petrovich leaning against the opposite wall, watching the soon-to-be-ex-couple bicker. The door to the stairwell, heavy and slow-moving with hinges that desperately needed oiling, closed behind him with a _squeak_ and a _click_.

Margit eyed the dark-haired young man warily. It was no secret that Margit didn't like Petrovich –or any of this roommates, for that matter- but Margit never _could_ resist the urge to gossip.

"He's number seven." Margit supplied with a wry, if half-hearted, smile.

"Think they'll be finished soon? Boris can't stand the racket."

Ivan was hardly talkative, least of all to her, but, Margit supposed, everyone had an off day. Then again, everyone had an off day when _Boris_ was having an off day. Kuznetzov was, in Margit's humble opinion, nothing short of terrifying.

Up ahead, the argument had made a rather sudden leap from bitter and shrill to angry and physical. Margit's eyes darted over to the scene in time to see Karl grab Jayda's wrist just as she was about to enter her apartment, twisting it at an angle meant more to halt the girl, rather than hurt her, but from the expression on Jayda's face, the Canadian didn't see it that way.

"..._Hell_." Ivan muttered, and there was a flicker of something in his eyes. Not for Jayda, Margit realized immediately. He was eyeing the door to his shared apartment and the old woman understood. A fistfight was to Kuznetzov what gossip was to Margit; he never _could_ resist.

Problem was... it didn't matter who started the fight, because when Kuznetzov got into a fistfight, he _ended_ it. Valkovich usually kept the man under control, but Valkovich was out for the evening; he always disappeared until the wee hours of the morning on Fridays.

Ivan's concern ended up being unfounded. What could have been a punch-up was diffused with a single, two-syllable word, spoken in perfectly clear Russian. Not so much as a trace of an accent muddied the words, but that one word resonated throughout the entire hall, and that's when Margit _knew_ Jayda was furious.

"_Lawsuit_."

Most girls were (relatively) quiet when they were annoyed, if a bit shrill, and then loud and heated when they were angry. Jayda was the opposite; it was only when she suddenly went quiet and still that you knew you were in over your head.

Karl never came back to the apartment complex.


	19. Explode

**[Explode]**

She bumped into him at a nightclub, the label on the building roughly translated to some pretentious name like "Cloak and Dagger" but it was a fairly decent club. Good dancing music –not that she really danced or anything, but the ambiance was nice- and a damn good bartender.

She was sitting on a barstool at the counter, leaning onto the polished wood with her elbows, one arm resting over the other, waiting for her drink. She was dressed casually, conservatively compared to some of the girls she saw, and it worked well enough to discourage the more annoying men. Anyone else who approached was politely turned down, offers to buy her drinks were refused. For once, Jayda was just out for a –relatively- quiet drink and a little platonic company.

Sometime after midnight, he sidled up to the barstool next to her, startling her, because she hadn't even seen him in her peripheral vision. She told him so. He nodded, as if he'd expected as much. She told him that was kind of scary.

"Margit _asked_ me to find you." He stated abruptly, and he put a funny emphasis on 'asked', like he hadn't had much choice in the matter. If Margit was involved, that was probably the case. "She says you've been sulking in your apartment since Karl." He paused there, probably wondering who the hell Karl was, Jayda guessed, and then added, "She also inferred that Boris might have killed you."

Jayda threw her head back and laughed. Not because it was funny –Kuznetsov was a scary bastard- but because of the way he'd phrased it. Yuriy arched one eyebrow, as though he were questioning her mental stability.

"So, the old lady blackmailed you into finding me and presenting her with proof that I'm still breathing?" Jayda summed up, having to shout over the loud rave music the DJ had switched to. Glow sticks were starting to appear on the dance floor.

"_Da_." He answered, and there was no expression on his face. That wasn't unusual; Yuriy wasn't a very _expressive_ person. He didn't really smile, or frown, or laugh, or... talk, really. Sure he talked to her occasionally, but even then he was rather to the point. More often than not, he ended up just sitting with her in the lounge, watching her work on an essay or some such thing without saying so much as a word. Jayda had gotten used to it.

Still, it was just damn _scary_ when his facial muscles didn't so much as twitch as a pretty young thing in a tube top and miniskirt looped her arms around his neck and shoulders from behind and shouted, over the deafening rave music, "Hey, sweetheart! Wanna dance?"

Okay, Jayda thought, and there was a sinking sensation in her gut. Expressive or not, that wasn't _normal_. Men _react_ when a pretty girl all but climbs onto their laps and asks for a dance. They smile, or grimace, or _blink_, or do _something_. Yuriy didn't move. Not one freaking muscle. In fact, for all that Yuriy seemed to care, the girl didn't even _exist_.

... Except for his eyes. There was something about his eyes that _bothered_ Jayda. They were usually so calm, calculating... Now there was a touch of something too bright and too sharp behind those white-blue irises and it made the hair on the back of Jayda's neck stand on end. She thought that maybe that was what he looked like when he was mad.

It reminded her of a ticking bomb without a timer.

_Tick-tick-tick-tick_...

Then she thought that girl needed to get off of him _now_.

_Tick-tick-tick-tick_...

"_Hey_, why don't you bother someone else's boyfriend?" She barked at the other girl, a touch of anger colouring her voice. A touch of fear.

The girl looked a little startled –and a little stoned, now that the Canadian thought about it- but disentangled herself and moved on. Jayda watched her leave, deliberately avoiding looking at Yuriy, because she wasn't quite sure why she'd said that and that could get _awkward_.

It had been for the girl's own safety, of course. Jayda didn't think Yuriy was exactly... stable. Sure, he was incredibly intelligent and pragmatic –_hell_, even attractive- but not necessarily stable. Given his roommates, that wasn't exactly an unfounded statement.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the bitter taste in her mouth or the sudden twisting of her insides. If she had problems breathing, -and she wasn't saying that she did, but _if_ she did- then she was wearing an uncomfortable bra.

Totally for the girl's safety.

"Do you often go around claiming that strange men are your boyfriends?" Yuriy wanted to know, and he had moved closer so that she could hear him. She thought she heard a trace of amusement in his voice, but his expression revealed nothing. His knee touched hers, but didn't move away, and that made no sense because Yuriy didn't _touch _people. Not normally anyway. He didn't do regular physical contact.

Not that that explained his impromptu rescue from the reporters...

Jayda shook her head, deciding not to think about it. The rave music was giving her a headache as it was.

That glint in his eyes was gone now, at least.

"Hey, you looked uncomfortable." Jayda shot back, not unkindly, and the bartender handed the Canadian her drink; a White Russian. She took a sip, glancing at the redheaded Russian over the rim of the glass. "Was I _wrong_?"

"_Nyet_." He stood, then, and offered a hand. Jayda was beginning to feel a little concerned about his sudden touchy-feely approach. It was just too contradictory to what she had come to expect from the man. "Come. Margit will pester me again if I return without a body."

Jayda pretended not to feel a shiver run down her spine.


	20. Slip

**[Slip]**

It had all started out so well. She'd been making dinner at the time –over at Yuriy's, strangely enough. Drinking Night, as Jayda had begun calling it, had gradually turned into a biweekly affair, and Jayda couldn't hold her liquor on an empty stomach –which was a source of endless mockery when Ivan was around- so she usually ended up making dinner. For the five of them. In their apartment.

Weird, yes -but, then, stranger things had happened. Yuriy breaking his _no-touchy_ rule twice now, for example, or Ivan making a flash-bang grenade at her kitchen table, or Sergei actually _talking_ to her way back when...

Either way, it had started out well enough. She'd been making dinner, and Ivan, Boris, and Sergei had gone out for whatever alcohol they could get their hands on.

Now, Jayda wasn't normally clumsy. In fact, she was almost never clumsy. Lately, however, her luck just _sucked_, so she hadn't been all that surprised when, while chopping up a particularly slippery tomato, the knife had slipped and she'd cut her thumb open. Judging from the sheer amount of blood gushing from the cut, she'd cut herself pretty deeply.

Surprisingly, instead of swearing, she found herself holding her bloody thumb over the sink and eyeing the blood-stained tomato, announcing wryly, "Well, _that_ tomato's done."

Yuriy threw a towel at her and, in that not quite apathetic way of his, scowled and called her a "_neukljuzhuju devochku_."

* * *

**Russian** **Translations**:

Neukljuzhuju devochku: Clumsy girl


	21. Hold

**[Hold]**

"Ow! _Fuck_!"

Yuriy glanced up from his work, white-blue eyes sending a flat, unsympathetic stare her way, and Jayda felt distinctly nauseous as he pulled the curved needle and thread through the skin and meat of her thumb with a pair of forceps.

"Stop moving." He told her, and there wasn't much in the way of emotions in either his tone or his face, but Jayda got the funny feeling that she was trying his patience. Given the man's normally stoic self, that was saying something.

"Sorry." She managed through grit teeth, and, goddamn, that _hurt_! Her eyes watered so much that everything went blurry, and she was clenching her jaw, trying to keep her throat closed so she wouldn't whine or curse or shout or scream or do any number of the things she desperately wanted to do.

She'd decided to go with the tried and tested method of refusing to breathe when in extreme pain, exhaling quickly and then inhaling sharply every minute or so for the –in her opinion- very flimsy reason of needing oxygen to live. Most of her willpower was directed towards not jerking her arm away on reflex, because the stitch Yuriy was working on wasn't finished, so it was still connected to the thread and the thread was still tied to the needle and the needle was still held in the forceps that were still in Yuriy's hands.

In short, if she moved, she'd rip the stitch right out of her thumb.

It helped if she focused on other things, like the texture of the table, or the bit of hair in her eyes, or the heat through the latex glove of the hand that held hers still, the palm of his hand against the back of hers, fingers wrapped around the backs of her fingers, keeping them curled, while the side of his thumb propped hers up, kept the digit from bending...

Idly, with a little voice in the back of her mind quietly asking if she was in shock, she wondered if that counted as hand-holding...

Yuriy tugged a little too hard on the thread as he finished tying the second stitch in her thumb, and she hissed suddenly, reflexively tried to pull away without meaning to. He was quicker than she was, though, one hand slackening the thread, the other holding her hand in a vice-like grip that hurt more than it should have.

Wincing, knowing that he was deliberately putting too much pressure on her hand, because it wasn't that hard to restrain her, –she wasn't exactly a body builder, y'know?- she met his eyes. When grey irises met white-blue, the person -the thing- she saw was not her friend. It wasn't even her sort-of-friend. She looked into those eyes and saw something that should not have been there, something not _right_, and it made her think of wolves and cold and prey and _not safe_.

Jayda didn't know what _it_ was, but she knew she was on thin, thin ice.

She froze almost instantly, instinctively, not even half-way through completing the reflexive retreat. The cold in his eyes remained, and for several long, painful moments she stayed very, _very_ still. Alarmed, not quite frightened, and acutely aware that something was _wrong_, she watched him and he watched her, and then gradually, little by little, the cold in his eyes began to seep away. As it did, slowly, deliberately, she relaxed the muscles of her arm, just a little bit at a time, began to unclench her fingers as best she could with their movement so restricted, carefully, cautiously.

And then it was as if nothing had happened. The painful grip was gone, the cold had all but disappeared, and the breath that she hadn't realized she'd been holding eased out of her lungs.

She didn't move again until Yuriy was finished the third and final stitch, waiting until he cut the thread and released her hand. She nodded her thanks, not knowing what to say –not knowing _how_ to say what she thought she _should_ say.

All the while, Jayda questioned herself, uncertain as to whether or not she'd really tried his patience _that_ much, or if he'd just confirmed what she'd always thought; he was as unstable as the rest of his group.

Wordlessly, she stood and returned to cooking, her back to the redheaded man. She could feel eyes boring into the back of her skull, and the little hairs standing on end on the back of her neck had yet to come down.

The others would be back soon.

Jayda wondered if that was a good thing.


	22. Itch

**[Itch]**

The worst thing about it was the constant, nagging itch.

It was a good itch, of course. Itching meant it was healing, that her nerves were back on the job and the tissue was repairing itself. It just made things difficult –like forgetting. She'd be able to forget the whole thing entirely if it weren't for that damned persistent itching.

In fact, she'd _love_ to forget that entire evening. Everything had been fine before that. A little awkward, sure, but it was always awkward around those guys. She was always acutely aware that she was an outsider, but it hadn't been so bad –Ivan and Yuriy talked to her on occasion, at least.

Now only Ivan talked to her.

It felt an awful lot like losing a friend. Not that she was sure he'd been a friend, per se.

Not that she was sure she _wanted_ him as a friend, after that. It was just... she'd gotten used to them, and, well... Shaking her head, Jayda set about determinedly focusing on something other than the maddeningly itchy stitches in her thumb. She just needed to forget.

Turning the page of her psychology textbook, she sighed, and crossed her legs habitually. The weight on her knee reminded her of something...

Quickly, she shut down the memory-thought, pretended not to feel the phantom press of his knee against hers within a memory of loud music and dim lights and writhing bodies and the sharp taste of alcohol.

The stitches itched.


	23. Intervention

Just to let everyone know -belatedly, I realize I should have put this in the first chapter- this is a series of _chronological_ drabbles. In effect, you can't really jump from chapter one to chapter fourteen and expect to fully grasp what's going on. Frequently, the the characters will reference an action or even from an earlier drabble-chapter.

Sorry for any confusion this might have caused!

**

* * *

**

**[Intervention]**

"_Privet_."

''Kay, I'm dead.'

It's not that she didn't _like_ Boris... he was just really, really _scary_ when he was in one of his moods. Unfortunately, Boris was _always_ in a mood.

That said, there's something rather terrifying about opening your front door to find a big, burly Russian man grinning maniacally at you -especially when he doesn't blink.

...More so when it's _Boris Kuznetsov_ on the other side of the fucking door, a very worrying grin on his face and a very frightening, very _distinct_ lack of blinking happening.

At that point, aforementioned man could say anything from "Scream and you die" to "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die" to "Would you like to hear about Jesus?" It wouldn't really matter which, because your first impulse would _still_ be to scream and slam the door in his face.

And then call the police.

Or jump out the window -whichever was faster, really.

The Russian before Jayda, however, was nothing if not straightforward. He said hi and bypassed the door-slamming step entirely –skipping the break-down-the-door step completely while he was at it- before reaching forward and snagging the front of her shirt before she could so much as blink.

Stunned, Jayda very suddenly found herself bodily thrown over Boris' shoulder, carried across the hall, through a doorway, and into a living room. It was the very living room she'd been avoiding for the past three weeks, incidentally.

All the while, the Canadian was, understandably, swearing and twisting and digging her nails into the pressure points of his opposite shoulder through his jacket. Quite quickly, she figured out that that wasn't working, and Boris just about dropped her out of shock when she shove her –cold- hand down the neck of his shirt and attacked the pressure point directly. She felt his arm immediately go limp and his leg might have tried to give out. Jayda couldn't really tell. It _should _have. That's what usually happened with that particular pressure point, anyway.

The surly Russian in question seemed to be partially immune to that pressure point, (either that, or she was doing it wrong) much to her chagrin. Instead of momentarily weakening, thereby allowing her to get away, Boris swore viciously and tossed down onto a couch not unlike how one would with a heavy sack of potatoes. Jayda rather resented the comparison.

Stunned, and a little disoriented, Jayda took a few seconds to get her bearings back. When she did, she found herself surrounded by Ivan, Sergei, and Boris in a dimly lit room with all possible exits cut off by furniture or a burly Russian man. All three men had pinned her with flat, calculating stares, and Jayda began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Yuriy, she noted almost absent-mindedly, wasn't present.

As the grey-eyed woman looked around at her three kidnappers, she got the strangest feeling that this was an intervention.

Or an interrogation. Hard to tell. The absence of a bright, swinging light overheard was hopeful, though.

"Okay..." she said slowly, eyeing the trio warily. She inched away from the three, moving a little further to the edge of the couch. "That was... _unexpected_."

By _unexpected_, of course, she meant _scary as hell_, but she wasn't about to tell them that.

"So..." Ivan began carefully.

That wasn't a good sign. Ivan was never careful when he said something. Putting things delicately just didn't occur to the guy. Hell, the words delicate and subtle probably weren't even in his dictionary.

Seriously. The man blew stuff up for kicks. That kind of person just _wasn't_ subtle.

Boris, evidently fed up with the situation, his sore shoulder, Ivan, Jayda, and probably the entire world, beat Ian to it.

"The fuck did you do?"

* * *

**Russian Translations:**

Privet: Hi


	24. Intercession

**[Intercession]**

Jayda stared at Boris, not entirely sure about what she'd just heard.

"What did _I_ do?"

"He's been pissy since you left." Boris clarified tersely, his eyes narrowed. "You did something."

Ivan threw his hands up in the air and shot Boris a dirty look, as if to say, "Well, so much for handling _that_ properly." Sergei, as usual, was impossible to read.

The stitches on Jayda's thumb itched accusingly, and her ire rose at the accusation, accompanied by an angry glare.

"I don't know what _he_ told you, but I don't have a fucking clue what I did!" Jayda found herself snapping, and, really, that was a bad idea, because she was talking to three rather volatile, rather dangerous guys, on _their_ turf, with _their_ rules.

"What happened?" Sergei rumbled, and his voice was a deep, rolling sound. It was a shock, really, to hear him speak -enough of a shock to put a stop to her rising indignation and to get Jayda to focus. There was no expression on the taciturn man's face, but Jayda was used to that by now.

"Well, I cut myself," Jayda began hesitantly, because she really _didn't_ know what had happened; one minute everything had been fine, and then next... "The knife slipped while I was making dinner."

Maybe, it occurred to her, she was hesitating because she didn't know how they would react more than anything else. Despite their –many- flaws, she _liked_ the four Russians from across the hall. It was incredibly stupid and irrational and probably suicidal in the long-run, yes, but that didn't change the fact that she liked the quartet. She didn't want to lose whatever respect she had managed to earn in their eyes by fucking things up.

"Yuriy stitched you up." Ivan observed, pointing to her hand. Jayda managed to refrain from hiding her hand on reflex, and she shifted uncomfortably.

"Yeah." She affirmed slowly.

"And?" Ivan prompted, watching her with expectant black eyes.

"Look, I don't know-" Jayda found herself spluttering, her hands raised in a pacifying gesture, palms outward. She couldn't hide the frightened undertones in her voice, as much as she wanted to, and Boris picked up on them like a shark picks up on fresh blood.

"_And_?" Regardless of whether or not she liked the man, Jayda had very quickly learned that when Boris took the time to _prompt_ you to do something, you damn well did it.

"I _flinched_, okay! I flinched! And, I don't know, maybe that pissed Yuriy off! _I_-_don't_-_know_!"

The trio fell silent, and they all looked at each other. There was something significant about that, but what it was Jayda didn't know. Jayda wasn't sure she wanted to know; none of them looked particularly happy.

The front door opened, and Yuriy walked in.

As with a hundred times before, white-blue eyes connected to grey ones. Jayda felt a chill run up her spine.

Everyone in the apartment went very, very still.


	25. Accord

**[Accord]**

It was always a little unnerving to make eye contact with someone with white-blue eyes. It just struck her as such a strange, and inhumanly cold colour, and it was difficult to reconcile the fact that it was a perfectly normal eye colour with the discomfort she sometimes felt.

Yuriy had the damn-near magical ability to amplify that discomfort tenfold, to twist it and mould it and make it into something like dread, like her first impression about the colour of his eyes was _right_ somehow. Bumping into him in the hallways, however fleetingly, briefly, had been like that. Awkward and disturbing and frightening after only a split second of eye contact.

Now, however... Now wasn't quite so bad. There was something a little less cold in his eyes now, and the uneasiness she normally felt was barely noticeable.

"You're back." He said, and, as always, there was no emotion in that familiar drawl of his. It was the first thing he'd said to her in three weeks.

Jayda glanced at Sergei, Ivan, and Boris. They watched her like a scientist watches a rat trying to navigate a complex maze –hoping the rodent would get it right, but not even considering moving to help it. It was a little unsettling.

Not as unsettling –read _terrifying_- as being kidnapped by Boris, certainly, but definitely up there.

She met Yuriy's eyes again, and the answer rolled off of her tongue before she'd really even thought about it, hesitant, "...I guess I am."

There it was. Quiet, a little hesitant, and filled with a damnable undertone of hope. She could school her expressions, control her body language, even stifle some knee-jerk reactions, but she'd never been able to control the tremors and lilts and undertones that her voice carried.

Yuriy nodded, as if that was only right and proper, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Like she was some prodigal lamb finally returning to the fold.

She'd be damned if she knew _why_, but it was like she'd stayed underwater for too long, and now she could breathe again.


	26. Retrospection

**[Retrospection]**

Now and then, Jayda liked to take stock of things -her life, her relationships, her grades, that sort of thing. Sitting in the lounge, as was her habit nowadays, with her ever-silent partner, sipping the most fantastic coffee she'd ever tasted and flipping through her chemistry textbook, Jayda took a moment to consider her current state of affairs, forming a list in her mind.

Life: so far so good. No financial problems to speak of, relatively good health –that _one_ issue aside- and a fairly clean, function, and comfortable home.

Grades: _damn_ good. Her GPA was sitting at a solid six-point-nine (out of a maximum of nine) with only mathematics dragging her down, she liked her classes, as well as her peers and professors, and she was handling the move overseas well.

(Romantic) Relationships: god-awful, but that was no surprise. All attempts at dating had been deemed useless and therefore put on hold until her self-esteem improved, or she bumped into Prince Charming at a night club -whichever came first.

(Platonic) Relationships: ... now that was the million dollar question.

Jayda glanced up from her textbook, finding Yuriy watching her, as usual, with his unreadable, calculating stare. Since her bizarre intervention, things seemed to have returned to normal. The stitches were out, finally, her thumb having healed nicely, leaving only a thin red-purple line as a reminder of that strange evening.

Drinking Night was back to being a biweekly event (now with horror movies included) and she still made the five of them dinner, though she was a hell of a lot more attentive when she was cutting things now.

Boris and Sergei went back to ignoring her, and Ivan had even showed her how to make a car side-door bomb with, amongst a plethora of other things, a bunch of wires, a battery, something that might have been an eraser at one point, and a condom.

Jayda wasn't sure what to think about that. Well, no, she _did_ know how she felt, it was just... weird. She knew for a fact that she wasn't too keen on bonding with Ivan over bomb-making sessions, but she seriously suspected that that was Ivan's version of being nice.

She pitied his future girlfriend.

Then again, a week later Ivan still hadn't stopped making fun of her horrified expression when he'd –seemingly randomly- brought out a condom along with all of the other objects sitting on the kitchen table, so maybe he wasn't being all _that_ friendly after all.

That still hadn't cleared up what had happened with Yuriy, though.

Not that she knew what, exactly, had happened, but she was pretty damn sure _something_ had.

Stupidly-absurdly-half-seriously, she hoped that that... incident... wasn't _Yuriy's_ version of being nice.

It wasn't, she knew, but now that the thought had lodged in her brain...

No. Yuriy's version of being nice was... weird, actually. Most people _talked_ to other people –small talk and all that jazz. Friends shared jokes, hung out, went to movies, and maybe exchanged stories.

Not that guy, though.

All Jayda got was a mug of coffee shoved under her nose and a weekly sessions of constantly being watched from across a table –or, on particularly sullen days, from across the room.

And an impromptu rescue.

And a stitched thumb.

Jayda decided not to think about it too much; it was weird.


	27. Amity

**[Amity]**

Jayda couldn't help but feel some surprise at how normal the sensation of being watched seemed now, as if the Russians been doing that for years instead of just seven months. Some small part of her couldn't help but point out that she was spending less and less time in her own apartment nowadays, too.

Hell, she'd practically moved in with the strange men from across the hall without even realizing it.

Still, it was enjoyable, as odd as that might seem –and there sure as hell were a lot of reasons for that to seem strange! They all but kidnapped her for their biweekly Drinking Night (regardless of whether or not she actually wanted to go with them), picked her locks and walked right into her apartment without so much as a by-your-leave (which had lead to some very awkward situations in the past), made absolutely no indication as to whether or not the food she made was even _edible_ (which was just plain rude), either mocked her constantly or ignored her (also rude), and had the remarkable ability to make a corpse look like a regular Chatty Cathy!

It was _infuriating_!

...But, at the same time, none of them rejected her. If anything, they made room for her -in their own cold, insensitive, borderline-socially-inept way. She felt like she was an auxiliary component to their four-part machine; not necessary, but not unwelcome, either.

All in all, the whole affair was a mixture of maddening, strange, and a tad bit surreal at times.

The rest of the time, however, it was bizarrely pleasant.

It was kind of like they'd become friends.

"Fucking hell! I can't believe you jumped during _Halloween_! It wasn't even _scary_!" Ivan's nasally voice cut into her thoughts, brimming with wicked amusement and the promise of endless mockery.

... Then again, maybe that was asking for a little too much.

Jayda heaved a sigh, feeling rather disenchanted.


	28. Colour

**[Colour]**

"What does it mean?" A low, rumbling voice posed the question. Sergei.

Jayda looked up from her book –a very witty, very tongue-in-cheek fantasy novel that she'd found at the top of her bookshelf the other day- to see Sergei pointing casually at her from the armchair to her right. Not fully understanding what the normally quiet man was asking, the Canadian looked down at herself and realized that he was pointing at the teal ribbon she wore.

_Oh_.

"It means..." she began hesitantly, unsure of just how much information she wanted to give away. She felt the tingle of eyes on her, and yet not one of the three remaining Russians was outright watching her.

She didn't want their pity.

"It means I'm sick." She finished after a long moment, dropping her eyes to her book again.

Almost immediately, she regretted saying it, because the stare-tingles intensified and she didn't want pity.

Not that they were the pitying kind, but emotions were rarely rational things.

Sometimes, she kind of wished she was like Yuriy. He was never irrational or overemotional; he had a logical reason for everything he did –even if she didn't necessarily know what the reasons were herself. Turning another page, listening to the dry, thin sound over the ringing silence, she wondered when he'd gone from being Valkovich to Yuriy in her mind.

"Curable?" That characteristic drawl, measured and calculating, inquired.

The redhead in question sat on the opposite end of the couch from her, and she knew without having to look that those white-blue eyes were fixed on her, if only because she suddenly got goose bumps all over. That had been happening a lot recently, she thought to herself.

Jayda didn't really want to investigate that particular development; she wasn't sure if she'd like what she found.

Instead, she answered, "_No_."

Her tone brooked no further discussion on the matter, and the man remained silent.

She didn't want his pity.


	29. Fluff

**[Fluff]**

Jayda took a sip of her coffee –courtesy of her redheaded mostly-friend- and stared out the windows of the lounge.

Today wasn't a homework day, she'd decided earlier; she just hadn't been in the mood for staring at pages upon pages of boring text about cladograms and genetic profiling. No, not today. Today the sun seemed too faint, and the clouds too gloomy and dark and stifling. Today, she thought to herself once more, was not a work day; it was a sit-and-think day.

Today, Yuriy watched her watch the world with a subdued expression on her face, her eyes a thousand miles away, only loosely tethered to her physical form in the real world.

Ever since she'd revealed the purpose behind the ribbon she always wore, Ivan had been trying to figure out what illness she had. Not subtly, either.

Then again, since when was Ivan ever actually subtle?

Jayda didn't doubt that the moment she'd left their apartment, Ivan had looked up the symbolism of teal ribbons; he was that kind of person. Excessively curious, always poking and prodding and investigating, like a kitten with a new toy. Jayda wrinkled her nose at that mental image.

While she didn't have a problem with Ivan being curious, he was poking and prodding nerves that were a little too sensitive, a little too raw. Yes, she had accepted that she had this... syndrome, and, to some small degree, she'd made her peace with it –but she wasn't coping with it.

She could make so many comparisons, so many analogies, all drawing on common idioms, or phrases, or concepts. She could call it an elephant that followed her from room to room, or a mess that she hid under the carpet. She could compare it to a brand new tattoo, all tender and raw and hypersensitive, or perhaps to a missing limb, with phantom aches and pains that kept her up at night. She could do a thousand things. Instead, she chose to do nothing.

The world was her hospice, and this was her cancer; coping was her chemo.

She wasn't coping.

It showed, too, she realized; cover-up could only do so much for the rings around her eyes that whispered traitorously of too many sleepless nights.

Yuriy reached over and picked a bit of fluff off her sleeve, almost absent-mindedly –except that Yuriy was never absent-minded. Brought back by the contact -fleeting, deliberate- Jayda returned to the real world, and Yuriy nodded to her, as if he knew.

She took another sip of her coffee, unable to force muscles to smile, to convey the flicker-thought of her gratitude. His eyes rested on her, and the weight felt strangely tangible. After a long moment, he nodded once more, as if he understood.

It occurred to her then that, perhaps, it wasn't a good thing to spend hours and hours within a week being observed and analyzed by an incredibly intelligent and incisive man –particularly when she was feeling vulnerable.

She wondered how much of herself had she given away already, how much of herself had she kept safe?


	30. Switch

**[Switch]**

_"...To anyone just tuning in, we have some breaking news regarding the murder of sixteen young women that occurred several months ago. Police have just discovered another crime scene and are stunned by what they've found. Clara, what can you tell us?"_

_"Margaret, most serial killers have a set pattern that they very rarely deviate from. This doesn't appear to be the case for the man behind this recent set of murders. Instead of murdering another group of young women, the murderer has switched his M.O. to sixteen young men. Police haven't released the names or descriptions of the victims yet."_

_"Clara, is it possible that this crime was not committed by the same serial killer –maybe a copycat?"_

_"No, Margaret. Police have confirmed that the crime scene and cause of death is a perfect duplicate of the last crime scene. Given the few details we've been permitted to release about the case, it is very unlikely that this is a copycat."_

*

Four sets of eyes narrowed, watching the report with a sudden wariness. Ivan reached for the remote and turned the television set off.

"He's escalating." The surliest of their quartet, Boris, commented. Sergei stood and headed into the kitchen.

"No." Yuriy disagreed, eyes narrowed and nostrils flared. They'd seen this before, a long time ago –but he'd taken care of it. He hadn't expected something like this to flare up again. Yuriy hated being wrong. "This one is experimenting."

Sergei lumbered back into the living area, and handed each of the three a bottle of beer. His expression was passive, at most vaguely intrigued, but it was the stiffness of his spine that gave him away.

They'd all been a little suspicious when they'd heard about the first murders; if it hadn't been for the fact that the victims were female, it would have been eerily similar to what happened before. Now, however, it was all but confirmed.

"He's dead." Boris stated in his usual blunt manner, twisting the cap off of the tinted glass bottle.

"He wasn't the only one who had access to those files." Sergei pointed out, and there was a hint of a frown forming on his face.

"You destroyed them." Ivan said suddenly, eyeing Yuriy.

"The originals, _da_. There could have been copies." Agitated, the redheaded Russian ran a hand through his hair.

"_Goddamn_."

This wasn't supposed to be happening.


	31. Unctuous

**[Unctuous]**

"Ahh, you must be Miss Anderson." An oily-smooth voice greeted her, a shadow falling over her textbook.

Bemused, Jayda looked up to see an older man –he was maybe fifty or sixty years old- with dark, rakishly slicked back hair. He was wearing a lab coat –an instructor, maybe?- and held a clipboard in one hand, and there was something smarmy about the friendly smile plastered onto his face.

Jayda had been approached by his kind before. Especially recently.

"The last reporter who followed me around campus and asked me if I was pregnant with Andreyev Kozlov's bastard love-child came away with a broken nose and a thoroughly refreshed fear of god. You, I'll just beat to death with my textbook." Jayda warned, and she was -mostly- serious, too. The whole Andreyev thing had finally died down, but there were still a few die-hards she needed to get rid of somehow.

The man laughed, and it sounded awkward and forced, like he didn't laugh very often. "Not at all, my dear! My name is Professor Balkov. I've been looking for high-ranking students within the biology faculty for a study regarding the performance of students inside the faculty versus students outside the faculty. You happen to be ranked in the top one-hundred within the faculty. Would you be at all interested in participating in a study?"

Jayda couldn't help the downward-tug of her lips that revealed an aborted scowl. "Your records are flawed. I'm not _in_ the biology faculty. If you'd done your research properly, you'd know that. Given that you evidently haven't, and therefore don't, I can only conclude that whatever study you plan to do will be flawed and ultimately invalid due to sloppy methodology."

Harsh? Yes. True? Absolutely.

Also, she was trying to study, and she hated it when people interrupted her when she was trying to do something.

The man seemed a little put off, like she'd told him something he didn't want to hear, but he valiantly maintained the smarmy smile. "I see. Well, we _do_ need participants for a control group. If you're interested, here's my card."

Almost flippantly, he tossed a card onto the table. The gesture was belligerent and rude, but the smile never left his face, even as he turned on his heel and left, the heels of his shoes clicking smartly on the tile floor of the library.

That was when she knew the man wasn't an instructor, or even a professor. Professors and instructors didn't leave _cards_ for students. They told their students where their office was and what hours they'd be in during.

Whoever the hell that man was, Jayda thought, he was sloppy. She tucked the card away into her purpose for later -just in case it turned out to be important.


	32. Cliché

**[Cliché]**

It's a generally accepted view that clichés are awful, awful things and should never, under _any_ circumstances, be used.

Unfortunately, life tended to have other ideas.

"_Oh-my-god_, we're stuck in a cliché." Jayda's voice came from the other side of the small, pitch-black elevator. She was sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the metal death-trap, her back to one of the reflective walls with her elbows on her knees and her head propped up by her hands. She couldn't really see what Ivan was doing.

"Which one?" Ivan's nasally baritone asked from over by the elevator door. He was fiddling with the control panel –at least, that's what Jayda assumed he was doing.

"The lamest one _ever_: two people get stuck in a broken-down elevator for X number of hours with nothing to do but share their respective sob stories and make out until they're rescued."

The tiny elevator was silent for the longest time after that.

"... Are you... _hitting_ on me?"

"No! _God_ no!" Not that Ivan could see it, but her face was contorted into an expression of abhorrence.

"Oh, thank _god_! That would have been _weird_." Ivan sounded relieved.

Jayda, naturally, took offense. "_Hey_! And just what's so awful about me, huh?"

"...Is there a safe answer to that?" Ivan wanted to know, and he sounded a tad bit hesitant.

"Not really, no." Came Jayda frosty reply.

"...I'll just hurry up and fix the elevator then?"

"Might be a good idea."


	33. Implication

**[Implication]**

There had to be something she could do. Surely, there was something she was overlooking, some remedy she hadn't heard of or considered. She'd tried everything she could think of with no success, but that couldn't be _everything_, could it? There had to be _something_ other than pills.

The rings under her eyes were starting to look more and more like bruises, dark and purple and difficult to hide.

She was so _tired_...

Heaving a sigh, she rubbed ineffectually at her face, as if that would wake her up a little, as if it would keep the pervading feeling of absolute exhaustion at bay. It didn't. Her skin felt thin and too tight and her bones might as well have been made of lead, and she was pretty sure her hair had stopped shining now; a warning that she was running low on her reserves.

Dismal, she glanced over at her fellow redhead.

For once, they were in her apartment, as opposed to his apartment or the lounge, but the routine hadn't changed otherwise; they sat in relative silence while one worked, and the other observed. Usually she worked and he observed, but now and then he brought his laptop with him and typed something up. On rare occasions, neither of them had any particularly pressing work to do, so they sat in an almost peaceful silence.

It was strange, how they rarely spoke to one another during these sessions, yet the silence felt comfortable, like it would be with an old friend. She wasn't sure if he –or any of the four men from across the hall- really was her friend, though.

Certainly, they weren't enemies, but they weren't really acquaintances anymore... At the same time, calling them friends seemed like pushing her luck, somehow. To the four, she was an auxiliary component, and she was fine with that, but what were they to _her_? Jayda sighed again. Trust her brain to overcomplicate things.

"Why do you keep doing that?" Yuriy wanted to know, and the sound of her voice drew her eyes to him almost instantly. His stare was calm and even, as was his nature, with the faint glint of something that was always calculating, measuring, analyzing...

"What?" Jayda asked stupidly, not understanding at first.

"Sighing." The pale-eyed man answered curtly. "Why?"

Huh.

"Well..." Jayda began uncertainly, because she knew damn well she wasn't going to tell the truth, but she hadn't quite come up with a convincing lie just yet. "I... can't sleep. And I can't think of anything I haven't already tried."

There. Technically it wasn't a lie. She had been thinking about that –it just wasn't what she'd been thinking about when she'd sighed the second time.

Yuriy opened his mouth, already raising an eyebrow, and Jayda moved for a pre-emptive response, adding, "Aside from drugs, I mean. Nothing works. I can't get to sleep, or I can't get comfortable, or I keep waking up. It's driving me crazy, and I look awful because of it."

Yuriy didn't answer her for a few moments, merely watching her with his flat, unyielding gaze. She counted twelve heartbeats before he finally spoke, and the way he said the words... it was like he thought the solution was the simplest thing in the world and he couldn't quite understand why it hadn't occurred to her yet. She wondered if he felt like that a lot when he spoke to her. She hoped not.

"Sleep somewhere else, then."

It was at that point that Jayda knew she really _was_ beyond exhausted, because that sounded strangely like an invitation.


	34. Caution

**[Caution]**

"You're not big on conversation, huh?"

Yuriy arched an eyebrow. There was the faintest trace of amusement in his pale eyes, and it flickered with the candlelight as the corners of his lips curled ever-so-slightly.

To be honest, Jayda wasn't too sure how they'd ended up in an actual restaurant.

Vaguely, she recalled that she'd been heading out to a club –more out of boredom than any need to seek companionship, which was a first for her. She'd been halfway down the hall when she'd remembered something and had turned back to knock on his door. After that, Jayda remembered calling from the other side of the two-inch oak barrier, "Hey, Yuriy, I'm pretty sure I still owe you a beer! You in?"

Somewhere between the door opening to reveal her habitually stoic almost-friend and sitting down at a booth in the back of the restaurant, waiting for their dinner and sipping at red wine in awkward silence, the plans for the evening that she'd had every intention of carrying out had changed. Yuriy had somehow steered her away from the club she'd been heading towards –a quirky little place called Plan B with crazy strobe lights and hardcore techno music- and had Jedi-mind-tricked her into an actual dinner.

She rather got the impression that Yuriy didn't like night clubs, so he'd engineered something a little closer to his comfort zone.

The whole affair was awfully similar to a date, and, well... that was just awkward, because this was _Yuriy_ she was having dinner with. Yuriy didn't date. In fact, Jayda wasn't even sure if he was interested in girls –or guys, for that matter. He seemed almost too logical for that sort of nonsense.

Like a Vulcan.

It was only through sheer effort and willpower that she refrained from imagining the Russian with a bowl-cut and a pair of pointy ears. Instead, she forced her mind away from such mentally scarring imagery and keeping it focused on the matter at hand...

... Aforementioned matter being that Yuriy didn't date, and possibly didn't have a sex drive.

Except Yuriy _also_ didn't do regular physical contact, or absent-mindedness, or any sort of silly sentimental thing you'd expect from a _normal_ person.

There in lay the problem. Yuriy actually _had_ been doing some of those things on and off recently, so, to be honest, Jayda didn't have a friggin' clue anymore. Her fellow redhead made absolutely no sense _whatsoever _sometimes.

"That," Yuriy answered her slowly, like he was testing the words in the very same way he would test an old vintage wine. "Depends entirely on the conversation."

There was something layered under that customary drawl of his. Something that wasn't quite dark, and wasn't quite playful, but hung in limbo between the two, curling his lips into a more pronounced smirk.

Inwardly stunned, and perhaps a little bemused, at the uncharacteristic display, Jayda thought that if the devil had a characteristic smirk, it would look an awful lot like the one on Yuriy's face. Momentarily, she wondered if he'd had too much wine, only to remember that the man's alcohol tolerance was a hell of a lot better than hers by _far_.

Still, she wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"Really?" Jayda encouraged mildly, leaning forward, her elbows braced against the smooth mahogany table. Interest coloured her voice, already low and leisurely with her West Coast Canadian accent, but she did not match his not-quite-playful undertone.

Yes, she kind of liked this new side of the man, - it was new and interesting and a little bit dark- but she wasn't about to encourage it until she knew what she was dealing with. This new facet to the man's personality was an unknown entity, accompanied by too many questions. Was it permanent? Would she see it again? Why was she seeing it now? Was it dangerous?

If nothing else, Andreyev Kozlov had taught her caution.

Yuriy didn't move to answer her prompt, but the flicker of amusement in his eyes intensified as the waiter approached with their meals.


	35. Medical Expertise

**[Medical Expertise]**

"This is bullshit. How the hell does a prick like that get fan girls, anyway?"

"Don't know, don't care."

Boris held out an ice pack for her, his face closed and indifferent as usual, and Jayda accepted it without comment, alternating between pressing it against her split lip and her rapidly bruising cheek. Gingerly, she dabbed at her lip with a clean dishcloth. It came away red; still bleeding. She slouched a little in her seat at the man's kitchen table. Ivan, who sat adjacent to her, looked puzzled.

"So, some random, crazy chick in the lobby got the jump on you... why?"

"Apparently, she was Kozlov's stalker or something like that. Some childhood friend or whatever who took offence to having his memory sullied by, and I quote, 'a dirty whore' like me. I think she said more, but I was too busy trying not to have my eyes scratched out by her fake nails."

"Did you win, at least?" Ivan wanted to know, looking a little sceptical as he took stock of her injuries; bruised face, split lip, and a set of deep scratches on each forearm.

"Would I be here if I hadn't?" Jayda shot back moodily, wincing as her scowl pulled at her damaged lower lip.

Ian seemed to consider this for a moment. "..._Da_. You strike me as the desperately lonely type."

Jayda threw the dishcloth at the shorter Russian, feeling surly and more than a little unimpressed. Ian made a noise of disgust and threw the cloth back at her.

"Hey! Keep your biological warfare to _yourself_!"

Sergei lumbered over with a bottle of gin and a few shot glasses. At Jayda's raised eyebrow, he rumbled, "_Medicine_."

Despite herself, and her split lip, she smiled and accepted a glass; Sergei was a fairly likeable guy –when he deigned to speak.

Unlike the remaining three, Jayda didn't drink her gin. Instead, she soaked the end of the dishcloth in the clear, colourless –and in her personal opinion, unbearably strong- alcohol, pointedly ignoring Ivan's protests, and set about dabbing at the scratches on her arms. Portions of the scratches had already started to scab over, but the deeper sections hadn't quite reached that point yet; the alcohol stung, and it was enough to make her eyes water.

"Don't be such a fucking wuss." Boris sent her a vicious scowl as she hissed through her teeth and withdrew the now-damp fabric from her arm.

And then he tipped the contents of his still-full shot glass over her arm.

"Fucking _hell_!"


	36. Neat Freak

**[Neat Freak]**

Meticulously, he checked the bindings, calloused fingers running over the smooth, creaking leather, noting its wear and durability with an almost clinical precision. The table, metallic and dimpled with numerous holes, –for more efficient draining, rather than aestheticism- he had cleaned himself, almost obsessively. Next to it, easily within arm's reach, a sterile metal tray resting on a cart, bearing his favourite instruments, all equally as clean and painstakingly sharpened to his specifications.

The chill of the meat locker had caused condensation. Condensation meant rust. That was unacceptable.

This new location, however, was perfect; isolated, quiet, and riddled with easy escape routes. Just in case.

Smiling to himself, he picked up a pen and jotted down a few notes on his clipboard, thinking back to the documents he'd gone over earlier that evening. The original research might have been flawed, but it was far from useless. If nothing else, the files held in creamy manila folders, almost harmless-looking, were his greatest inspiration.

His muse, in neat printed text.

His eyes strayed to the photos pinned to a corkboard he'd brought in –he was _so_ fond of the neat little organizational things that were out nowadays. The first batch of women hadn't worked. He hadn't been picky enough. Likewise, the first batch of men had failed. It had taken him some time to properly refine his search patterns, but now, _finally_, he thought he had the right formula. All that was left for him to do was to try it out -and fill his quota, of course.

Sixteen pretty bodies, a candle for each.

Sixteen pretty faces, a new set of data points.

Sixteen pretty girls, and a little game for him to play.

Sweet, sweet sixteen.

Idly, he brushed a tiny speck of dirt from his sleeve; he didn't like burying them, letting them rot and decay like that, but it had become something of a necessity.

It was only temporary arrangement, he assured himself. He'd find something better, soon.


	37. Edge

**[Edge]**

"Well, my reputation just went down the drain." The grey-eyed foreigner announced as she walked in, setting her purse down and taking her shoes off unconsciously. As she peeled her coat off and set it on the coat rack, she noted that Yuriy's, Ian's, and Sergei's coats were absent. Given that the door was unlocked, Jayda could only assume that Boris was in.

"You have a _reputation_?" His voice originating from somewhere in one of the apartment's side rooms, –bedrooms, she assumed, but she'd never been in them- Boris sounded a little sceptical. Suppressing the urge to roll her eyes, Jayda moved further into the apartment, wondering which room the burly man was in.

"Not _anymore_, no. Most of my peers think I'm either a psychopath or a masochist, my professors keep asking me if I'm okay and if things at home are alright, and now nurses are starting up with that we're-very-concerned-about-you crap." She answered, albeit a bit sulkily, as she moseyed around. "Where _are_ you?"

"Door to your left." Came the curt response, followed up by, "So stop acting like a freaking girl, then."

Frowning, Jayda turned to her left, her eyes landing on a half-closed door, a dim light emanating from somewhere inside the room. Should she enter? That sort of struck her as crossing a boundary... but, then again, Boris didn't really acknowledge boundaries the way most people did; either you had a green light, or you were horribly mangled. Or possibly dead.

Not exactly encouraging, but Jayda figured if the man hadn't tossed her out of one of the many fifth floor windows at that point, he probably wasn't ever going to. Hopefully. Taking a deep breath to prepare herself in case she needed to scream blue bloody murder or run away, Jayda pushed the door open a little more and strategically placed herself in the doorway. _There_. Technically she wasn't invading his territory, but she wasn't just awkwardly hovering outside of his room either.

The room beyond the plain, painted oak door was almost Spartan in its simplicity, with little more than a bed, a desk, a dresser, and a closet. No decorations were fixed onto the walls, and the desk bore no ornamental lamps or knick-knacks of any kind. The closet was perpendicular to her, its plain, folding doors opened. She thought she could hear some rummaging around from within the closet, but she wasn't sure. She couldn't see Boris anywhere.

"What do you mean acting like a girl?"The redhead wanted to know, and there was no mistaking the faintly affronted undertone to her question. "I don't run away, crying for help. I don't cower and hope someone comes and saves me. I fight back, _don't I_? How is that girly?"

"Like a girl, not girly." Boris muttered, and his head appeared from behind the closet door, his coal-black eyes fixing her with an agitated stare. "You coming in or what? I don't have all goddamn day, you know."

There wasn't much she could say to that, she Jayda complied and moved further into the room, until she stood at the foot of the bed, now parallel to the closet. What she saw was quite a surprise.

Mounted onto the wall, behind _several_ shirts and jackets that were hung up on hangers –all currently pushed to the side- was possibly the biggest display of knives she had ever seen. The man had everything from hunting knifes to utility knives to what she suspected might be military-issue knives, all shiny and clean and impossibly sharp. A light from within the closet lent the hard, tapered edges a sharp glean, and she saw that some of the knives had quite detailed work along the blades.

Holy crap.

"You're girly, but you act like one, too." Boris continued, picking up a large hunting knife with serrated edges towards the bone-handle hilt. He tested the edge against the pad of his thumb, only to decide that it was satisfactory and put it back. "You run around pissing people off, and then you get all bloodied up every time someone gets the jump on you. Why? Because you're completely fucking helpless. If it were me-"

"Boris, if it were you, there'd be a bloodbath and then Yuriy's head would explode." Jayda interrupted without really meaning to. The words had just sort of slipped out of her mouth before she'd had time to think about the pros and cons of actually _saying_ what she was thinking.

Boris stared at her for several long, awkward moments, and Jayda started calculating just how far away the front door was and if she could make it in time, only for the man to snort and continue talking. As he did, he continued to select and check the various knives, looking for defects or insufficient sharpness meticulously.

"Whatever. You're helpless. You suck at fighting." He set another knife –a kukri knife this time- back onto the rack, and picked up a machete. Strangely, Jayda didn't feel particularly threatened.

It probably helped that she'd opted not to point out what an unbelievably sexist statement he'd just made. Boris didn't debate things like feminism and gender equality. Boris just broke people's faces in a number of nightmare-inducing ways.

Of course, she hadn't witnessed any of this herself, but Ian was very good at telling graphic stories, and Sergei always confirmed them. Ian alone she might have disbelieved, but Sergei didn't exaggerate.

Chewing on her lip as she thought about what the man had said –she knew better than to get offended and throw a fit about a lack of confidence in her skills; whatever might be said about the man, when it came to fighting, he knew his stuff. If Boris thought she sucked, then she probably _did_.

"Okay... So teach me."

"_What_?" From the look Boris was giving her, he was seriously questioning her mental stability and wondering if there was something seriously _wrong_ with her.

What he didn't know was that, secretly, Jayda was, too.

The Canadian pointed at one of the bowie knives on the rack and, completely ignoring the Russian's disbelieving stare, noted, "That one needs to be sharpened a little more on the one side."

"_Anderson_."

Boris, it seemed, was the only one to still refer to her by her family name. Given the man's inherent distrust of everyone and anyone, as well as his normally hostile disposition, Jayda didn't take it personally.

"What? You said I sucked, so do something about it. Teach me how to fight properly." It all seemed very logical from the redheaded Canadian's viewpoint. Oh, sure, it was also absolutely bat-shit insane, because she was basically giving Boris permission to beat the crap out of her, but there was no denying that it was a terrifyingly logical idea.

A tingly feeling at the back of her neck prompted her to meet the man's eyes, and his expression was no longer one of disbelief. Instead, his eyes held that same calculating look that Yuriy always had, taking stock of her height, weight, and muscle mass before reaching a conclusion.

"_Nyet_."

Colouring with anger, she bit out, "Well, then, don't start complaining-"

"You're too damn _small_, Anderson; I'd snap your neck like a twig if I just _punched_ you."

Well that was a scary thought. Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, Jayda asked, "So, what, then?"

"Ask Yuriy to teach you." Boris muttered, and then he reached for the bowie knife. "He's the least likely to kill you by mistake."

Jayda pointedly ignored the goose bumps she felt all over her arms and neck, and she put the sudden fluttery twisting of her insides down to residual nausea from her prescription antibiotics.

She spoke once more without realizing it, only to wonder if she really was mentally _all there_, because, _seriously_? "Okay, I will. Thanks."

"Don't fucking mention it. I'm not joking -Ian will never shut up if he finds out."


	38. Crumble

**[Crumble]**

Contrary to Boris' advice, Jayda had not asked Yuriy to teach her how to fight "properly". Not yet, anyway. The whole thing just seemed so awkward. Then again, most things had seemed awkward around Yuriy recently, like she was hypersensitive to everything she did; sitting, eating, talking, breathing...

...Jayda opted not to overanalyze that one. Her head was fuzzy enough as it was.

Instead of taking Boris' dubious advice, she had been hitting the gym for the past two weeks, partly in the hopes of exhausting herself so she could sleep properly for a change, and partly because she wasn't exactly Conan the Barbarian, y'know? Besides, a little muscle tone never hurt anyone, and it would help her lose weight.

Problem was, she still couldn't sleep. If anything, all that exercise was just making her _more_ tired.

The whole thing was exasperating.

And tiresome.

... So very tiresome.

So there she was, standing in the hallway, repeatedly banging her head on her front door, because she felt like a bag of brittle old bones, and her head was foggy, and it was one in the morning already, and she _really_ needed to sleep. She wasn't all too sure what she was aiming to accomplish by slowly giving herself brain damage in the hallway's muted light, but it had seemed like a good idea when she'd started.

Was she really _that_ far gone already?

"Is there a point to this exercise?" A voice from behind her asked, sounding sceptical. She didn't recognize it for a few moments, her mind operating at _maybe_ thirty percent of its normal capacity –and that was if she was feeling optimistic. As it was, Jayda was _far_ from optimistic.

"...Don't think so." She sighed, pausing in her sleep-deprivation-induced masochism for a moment. She let her head rest against the door, her eyes sliding shut, feeling like someone had taped her eyes open and put weights on her eyelids at the same time. She felt a headache blossoming behind her forehead, and she grimaced, only half-listening to the shifting of fabric as Yuriy stepped closer.

"Then why?" The redhead sounded genuinely curious. Like she was a bug in a lab that had just done something terribly interesting.

The bug needed to sleep. The bug was going crazy. The bug was seeing things and losing track of time and people and conversations. The bug was also referring to herself as "the bug," which the bug found very worr-

Okay, she was stopping that now.

"Can't sleep. Really, really, really, really, _really_ want to... Can't though. Kinda sucks... Kinda think I'm going crazy sometimes, too... Eyes playing tricks... Not sure if that's healthy... What do you think?"

"Ivan thinks you're having a mental breakdown." Yuriy decided to inform her, as if that might in some way be remotely relevant to helping her sleep.

Jayda thought Yuriy was a bit of a jerk.

"Ivan's not helpful... And short... And not helpful... And you're kind of a jerk sometimes... Tall, though. Still not helpful..."

At this point, Jayda wasn't entirely sure what she was saying anymore, but some small, rational part of her made a mental note to make the mother of all apologies to the redheaded man when she was sane again. Her legs felt all wobbly and bendy and she really wanted to sit down, but she thought that if she did, she might not get up again, and for some reason her brain told her that might be bad.

"Neither is trying to give yourself brain damage at one in the morning."

"... Not the point." She felt goose bumps on her arms and neck again, and that meant he was watching her, and shut her eyes against another wave of exhaustion. Her legs were really wobbly now, like her knees weren't really locking right, and she was too heavy, and she _really_ wanted to sit down and just _sleep_, but she _couldn't_ and it wasn't _fair_.

"You don't have a point." Yuriy's voice came from above her head, and that was weird, because he wasn't _that_ tall. Groggily, she cracked open an eye, and _goddamn_, she'd sat down. Her back was pressed against her door, and her knees had been pulled up to her chest, and her head was on her arms, and she was _so tired_...

"I don't?" Jayda mumbled, feeling slightly surprised underneath the pervading feeling of fatigue. Of course she'd had a point!

... Hadn't she?

"_Nyet_."

"...Are you sure? I thought I... I don't know... I just want to _sleep_."

Standing over her, Yuriy sighed, and ran his hand through his short hair. She had the most irrational impulse to take a rule and measure how long his hair was, because... well, just _because_. She guessed it might have been an inch or so long, and he did that weird spiky-hair thing with gel, and it didn't look half-bad and _oh my god_ she needed to _sleep_.

In an unexpected moment of clarity, she looked him in the eye and said. "This isn't healthy, is it?"

"_Nyet_."

Jayda shut her eyes again under the weight of her weariness, only just catching the sight of the man crouching down to her level, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet and watching her with those unnerving white-blue eyes.

Pretty, pretty eyes...


	39. Rise

**[Rise]**

Immobile.

Immobile and so very heavy.

She couldn't open her eyes. They felt like they were made of lead and soldered shut. She couldn't make a sound, either; her throat mutinous in its refusal to respond to her will. The haze that hung over her listless mind seemed like a gentle weight, pulling her down into the warm softness of a deep sleep...

... Hang on. There was a sound.

Unless she was going mad, which was actually quite possible.

No! There it was again. Another sound –a string of sounds. Syllables. Words. _Speech_.

Voices –muffled, vague voices in the dark, beyond the fog that seemed thicker and heavier than before. That's what those sounds were. From beyond the darkness behind her closed eyes, she could hear voices.

"So _how_ long has she been out now?"

"Almost twenty-four hours."

"You drugged her?"

"Vodka and a mild sedative. She needed it."

"No shit. She looks fucking awful. How much longer, do you think?"

"If she were healthy, she would have already woken up. Her body is worn down and trying to repair itself without the proper resources."

"How long do you think she's been doing this to herself?"

"Look at her hair, Ivan. What do you see?"

Shuffling. Rustling. Cloth and carpet and light, careful steps. A shadow fell over her sealed eyes, though she wasn't sure how she knew, and something brushed her hair, lifting a lock from her brow. Fingers. A hand. She wanted to open her eyes, to move and tell this person to go away, to stop talking and let her sleep, because she was still _so tired_...

"It's dull. Dry. Coarse, too."

"It's been like that for weeks."

"_Why_?"

"Insomnia, likely, and a foolish reluctance to rely on medication."

"Because she's sick?"

"Possibly."

Silence. Silence was nice. Quiet, calm... drifting... It was warm here, and soft, and she felt so heavy... Drifting, drifting, drifting... senses dulling, sleeping, drifting... Dark and heavy and drifting and warm and soft...

Jayda's mind slipped into unconsciousness mere moments later, not to resurface for another five hours.


	40. Murmur

**[Murmur]**

Imagine, for one moment, what it might feel like to be clocked in the head with a sledgehammer.

That was exactly how Jayda felt upon waking.

"Ow, _fuck_!" She groaned, voice hoarse and dry as she curled onto her side with her head in her hands and the mother of all hangovers clog dancing on her head with _far_ too much enthusiasm.

"She lives!" Ivan's voice cried out from a distance, and he might as well have been shouting right into her ear. Jayda whined, holding one hand over her exposed ear and while the ground the heel of the other into her forehead, as if that would help. She burrowed further under the covers, dragging her pillow down with her, in an attempt to muffle the noises coming from outside of the dark room.

She heard the shuffling of feet over carpet, the shifting of fabric. Someone sighed, barely audible over the incessant pounding in her ears and her own internal monologue consisting entirely of expletives and curses.

A hand rested on her side through the blankets, light and cautious, and a low voice near her ear murmured something that was muffled by the numerous layers of fabric. It took her a several long moments to translate the Russian in her head, and it was a long and painful process.

"_Dobro pozhalovat'nazad_. You slept for thirty hours._ Kak dela_?"

_What_? Thirty hours? _How_-

Oh. Wait. She remembered now.

"_Valium and vodka? No. No way. I'd be out cold. Hell, I'd be completely fucking helpless!"_

"_You can take these or I can knock you out; your choice. One is considerably less painful than the other."_

"_What? _Why_? The hell do you care, anyway?"_

"_You've proven completely incapable of caring for yourself. I'm making sure you don't kill yourself out of sheer negligence."_

"...M'okay..." She mumbled from beneath the duvet, grimacing as the clog dancer picked up the tempo. "Head fucking _hurts_, but I'm okay..."

She rubbed at her eyes, yawning despite the amount of sleep she allegedly got, and blinked a few times. With a start –and a painful one at that- she realized something. These sheets were red, she thought maybe made of cotton, and they felt stiff and starchy. Hers were green and cream in colour, made with bamboo fibre, and felt much softer. This mattress was harder than hers, too.

Which begged the question... where the _hell_ was she?

Pulling the sheets down, uncovering her face, she was met with the sight of Yuriy at the side of the bed that wasn't hers, his hand still on the blankets over her side, still leaning down to speak to her. He didn't say anything when she raised her head –carefully, wary of the wrath of the clog dancer- and looked around in bewilderment. He seemed to be watching her reaction, and it made her feel like a bug again. She ignored the feeling in favour of taking stock of her environment.

The room was dark, the only light coming through the open doorway that lead out into the main living area, but she knew it wasn't her room. Her bed was up against a wall, the bed parallel to the door, with her dresser beside the doorway. This bedroom was all wrong; bed was in the centre of the room, perpendicular to the door, with the dresser to the left side of the room and a desk to the right...

... Which meant she wasn't in her apartment. Which meant that she was probably in Yuriy's apartment. Which meant...

Holy _hell_.

"This is your room?" She asked after a moment, brow furrowing. She probably looked like a mess right then, she thought, and that was somehow important.

Yuriy nodded, straightening. "_Da_. Now get up. You need to eat."

Inwardly, behind the wince of pain, she scowled. The man drugs her –with her permission, sort of- and all but kidnaps her, and then he up and demands that she eat, like she was four and didn't know how to do these things for herself. _Why_? Because he thought she really couldn't look after herself? _What a load of_- Jayda stopped.

Paused.

_Remembered_.

...Oh, hell. Why deny it? It was true, wasn't it? She'd said so herself, back in the hallway: 'This isn't healthy, is it?' She'd practically declared herself invalid, then. What was he _supposed_ to do? Leave her? In his own really fucking bizarre way, the whole arrangement showed that the man actually gave a damn.

Jayda didn't want to think about that.

Actually, she didn't want to think about _anything_. Thinking hurt, and the more she thought, the worse her head felt.

Slowly, stiffly, cautiously, she pushed herself off the bed and onto her feet, and hoped her head didn't explode on the way to the kitchen.

* * *

**Russian Translations:**

Dobro pozhalovat'nazad: Welcome back  
Kak dela?: How are you?


	41. Surrender

**[Surrender]**

Towelling her damp hair and musing over everything she`d been told since all but being force fed what must have been Ivan`s cooking –the guy blew things up for fun; that didn`t translate well into cooking skills- Jayda pursed her lips a little in irritation. She`s been woken up with the mother of all hangovers –which was currently being dulled by an excessive amount of pain killers- she`d been damn near force-fed, then frog-marched into a her apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, and _then_ she`d been frog-marched all the way back and told she wasn`t leaving any time soon.

Needless to say, Jayda hadn`t been impressed with this news, but her rational side, fuelled by thirty solid hours of drug-induced sleep, kicked in quickly enough.

"... So, for the record, you're kidnapping me until I'm better."

"Pretty much." Ivan confirmed unabashedly, stuffing several packs of ammunition into his army green duffel bag.

"But you guys are leaving." Jayda pointed out, watching as Boris, Ivan, and Sergei assembled their bags at the door from her position at the kitchen table. Yuriy hovered behind her, leaning against the kitchen counter with –last _she_ checked, anyway- a neutral expression on his face.

"It's hunting season." Ivan answered simply, as if that explained everything. "We always go away for two weeks in hunting season. _Normally_, Yuriy would come with us, but you're half-dead, so he'll stick around and get you back on your game."

It was nice that they _cared _but this was _really_ pushing it.

Jayda heaved a sigh. She'd already tried wheedling and shouting and manipulating her way out of her current predicament, -not a single attempt had even come close to working- but Jayda decided to give it one last go.

Half-hearted and with a smile that looked more like a grimace, she offered, "Guys, _seriously_. I could just bugger off to a therapist and get out of your hair entirely. Same results, less hassle."

Ivan frowned, and that wouldn't have been anything particularly profound if it hadn't been echoed to some degree by the two other men in her line of sight. Her brow furrowed in bemusement. Did they dislike therapists or something? _Why_?

From behind her, Yuriy countered her weak attempt to escape, and there was something undeniably _final_ in his tone. "You're staying. Get over it."

Jayda's thin shoulders slumped in defeat. She felt an awful lot like a Red-Coat on a Borg cube; resistance was completely, utterly, _comprehensibly_ futile.


	42. Concede

**[Concede]**

The door closed behind Ivan with a quiet click, and she was left alone with Yuriy. The redheaded man didn`t say anything, merely pushing away from the counter and disappearing into what she know knew to be his room.

If she were stupid, she might think that that was the perfect opportunity to escape.

Fortunately, Jayda wasn`t stupid –current predicament and ill-health notwithstanding, of course- and she recognized a bad plan when she saw one.

To begin with, she wouldn`t even make it to the door.

More importantly, though, there was the niggling thought that, despite herself, she knew that the four were right. Okay, yes, their methods were a little _unorthodox_, but the general sentiment was dead on.

Whether she really wanted to admit it or not, she wasn`t looking so hot, never mind how she felt. Thirty hours of sleep later, and she still felt awful. Wide awake, but awful.

Somewhere between not sleeping properly for two or three months and being sort-of-kidnapped, she had known that this whole not-looking-after-herself thing had become a problem, but she didn`t want to deal with it, because dealing with it meant having to come to terms with _that_.

The psychologist in her wondered if she was trying to punish herself for something.

Jayda told her inner psychologist to stuff it.

Jayda ran a hand through her still-damp hair, not quite mournful and not quite exasperated, but in the grey area between the two. It sounded like nine kinds of fucking cheesy, but she thought she`d been handling things. The worst part was that it was true; she really had thought that things were okay, up until recently. The insomnia-induced insanity from earlier tossed that thought right out the window, of course, but she _had_.

It was weird in the way that it totally _wasn't_ weird at all, but she didn't know what else to call it, so she'd run with that for now.

Whatever. It was _weird_; she'd never been an insomniac before. Not before those test results, anyway. At some indefinable point in time, she'd stopped wearing her cause ribbon, she'd thrown out those stupid pamphlets, and she'd deleted all of the bookmarks for websites with information on the subject. She'd tried to forget _it_ was even there.

That was a bit difficult to do when she had to take pills for _it_ every day.

That was probably when she'd started having trouble sleeping, Jayda supposed.

Oh, sure, there were plenty of excuses she could make, but they sounded like crap even to _her_ -never mind what _Yuriy_ would say to them. When she's been loopy out of her mind with sleep deprivation, the excuses had seemed like perfectly valid reasons. Now that she was at least somewhat sane, she saw righ through the bullshit.

When it came right down to it, Jayda knew she'd fucked up. It could have been much, much worse, but she'd still really messed herself up.

So, _no_, she didn`t want to be stuck there, but, _yes_, it really was in her best interest.

Mind you, who would _want_ to be confined with someone who made her generally uncomfortable and awkward? Especially someone as discerning and damn near ruthless as Yuriy when it came to working out puzzles and problems. She'd watched him run about fifteen different diagnostics on his laptop once, only to end up taking the machine apart, disassembling it into tiny, tiny bits. Why? To find out why the damn thing was a little sluggish.

He fixed the problem –something about something being jarred out of place somewhere- and reassembled the machine, but the event was a little scarring.

Jayda really didn't _want_ to be that laptop.

...But he was right, and she knew it, so she'd just have to sit back and deal with it.

She still felt like a goddamn Red-Coat, though.


	43. Comedy Of Errors

**[Comedy of Errors]**

Living with Yuriy was awful.

Well, perhaps _awful_ wasn't the word for her temporary residence.

Truthfully, words like _strict_ and _tyrannical_ and _awkward_ would be more fitting, but as the Canadian couldn't think of a word that encompassed all three of those words in one go, she'd stick with awful. In the meantime, she was alternating between flipping through a thesaurus and a dictionary. Maybe she should be looking for a noun? What about a metaphor? Metaphors were nice.

Living with Yuriy was like sharing a tiny cave with a particularly cantankerous bear.

No, wait. That was a simile. _Damn_.

Maybe there was a reason Jayda was majoring in psychology and not English...

Besides, the comparison was all wrong. Yuriy wasn't a bear. Yuriy was... well, for one, he wasn't big, brown, and furry. Like Chewbacca.

Involuntarily, trying to suppress the laughter bubbling up inside, Jayda snorted. Yuriy glanced up from his book, raising an eyebrow. That didn't help –if anything, the mental image was even funnier! She snorted again, despite desperately trying _not_ to.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Oh, fuck it.

Jayda threw her head back and laughed, because Yuriy would be the weirdest looking Chewie _ever_.


	44. Charm

**[Charm]**

It had been four days since Ivan and the other guys had left, and the situation had, amazingly, improved.

As it turns out, she didn't have to spend every waking hour within Yuriy's line of sight –thank _God_- but there seemed to be some vague, unspoken ground rules, the details of which Jayda only partially grasped. From what she gathered, the biggest two were that, one, she had to sleep at least ten hours every night, whether she wanted to or not, and, two, she was expected to make herself useful. There were minor rules, too, like not wandering around in any of the boys' rooms, or wandering off without so much as a note, but they were hardly worth mentioning. Now and then she slipped up with one of the little rules, and her redheaded companion became a bit irked, but so far things had been... tolerable.

Well, unless she didn't feel like sleeping and it was her designated bed time. _Then_ things got a little tense. And, yes, she now had a designated _bed time_. That was sitting pretty somewhere in the top five range on her list of ways-to-make-Jayda-feel-like-a-friggin'-kid-again. It was kind of insulting, actually.

Still, the arrangement wasn't too bad, all things considered. She basically went on with her day as usual –classes, studying, and all of those things- without much interference, but there was a notable change in location once _bed time_ hit.

"This isn't going to work in the long-run, you know." Jayda pointed out at length as she tossed a pillow and the duvet from her own bed onto the couch in the living room. Wandering around in her penguin-print pyjama bottoms–why, oh _why_ couldn't she have gone for something a little less childish?- and a tank top, Jayda concentrated on trying not to feel too humiliated about having a bed time at the age of twenty-five. She wasn't really succeeding.

Also, it was incredibly awkward to get ready for bed when someone was watching you with hawk-eyes and _not saying anything_.

Jerk.

Moseying on over into the kitchen, she checked on the milk she'd put onto the stove, stirring it absent-mindedly. It was just about done, she decided, setting the wooden spoon down on the counter and grabbed two mugs out of a nearby cupboard. She caught Yuriy raising an eyebrow in his reflection on the microwave, but he didn't comment on the second mug.

"Seriously," Jayda continued, since Yuriy didn't seem to be in a talkative mood. She tossed a couple spoonfuls of cocoa and sugar, followed by a haphazard dollop of vanilla extract –all taken from her own apartment, because her neighbours were damn near sugar-phobic with their ridiculously healthy eating habits, alcohol aside- into the pot and stirred for a few more seconds. "You're just conditioning me to sleep _here_. The moment Ivan and the others come back and I move back into my apartment, I'm not going to be able to sleep anymore."

As she expected, Yuriy didn't say anything, watching as she tilted the pot over the mugs, using the spoon to check the flow of the contents.

"I'm telling you, this is a faulty plan! It'll never work!" Jayda admonished half-seriously, tapping the wooden spoon on the side of the pot to dislodge any stray droplets before waving it in Yuriy's general direction. Her back was to the redheaded man as she set about cleaning up the mess she'd made, but her ears caught the rustling of fabric from the other side of the kitchen.

Taking her mug in hand when she was finished, she sat down at the table, wiggling her toes on the tile floor absent-mindedly. Yuriy maintained his position, leaning against the column that was part of the divider between the living area and the kitchen, his arms folded and his weight supported more by one leg than the other.

Sipping at her hot cocoa as she held the hot ceramic cup to her lips with her fingertips, she remembered the lonely mug on the counter.

"There's one for you, too, dork."

Yuriy snorted derisively, but pushed away from the wall all the same; the guy didn't talk much most of the time, but he _never_ turned down good food.


	45. Give

**[Give]**

It was day eight of her forced sabbatical, and, just maybe, Jayda decided, it wasn't all that forced after all. Already, she felt better. She felt stronger and saner and healthier and just _better_ in every sense of the word.

It made her feel guilty as _hell_, because he could have been out on what was probably an awesome hunting trip with his friends instead of sitting on the couch with her, watching some random slasher movie and babysitting her.

Uncurling from her perch on the far end of the couch and stretching out a long leg, she nudged his calf through his jeans with her the balls of her colourfully-socked foot. White-blue eyes that maybe weren't as unnerving as they were before glanced her way, and there was there was the faintest hint of a smirk around the corners of his lips.

"Hey," she said. "Thanks."

A few months ago, she wouldn't have dreamed of ever doing a foot nudge thing to get the man's attention. He was too different from her and too scary and too reserved, and she'd have been too uncomfortable with that.

Yuriy grunted in acknowledgement, and went back to watching the movie, but he absent-mindedly-but-not-really nudged her foot with his leg in return. It was such an utterly _Yuriy _reaction that it kind of made her smile, but that was _weird_, so she curled up again and refocused on the movie, too.


	46. Mirth

**[Mirth]**

The twelfth day, quiet and rather uneventful by Jayda's standards, ended with an impromptu walk in Wiseman's Park.

Originally, Jayda had been heading off to a bar, mostly because she was bored, but, just like last time, Yuriy had craftily avoided that part of town. Jayda was seriously beginning to suspect that he used Jedi minds tricks on her.

At some point, they'd grabbed some coffee from a nearby shop, though Jayda couldn't remember exactly when or what the shop was called. She'd been busy thinking and had completely zoned out, to her embarrassment.

They hadn't really walked around so much as moseyed about looking for a decent spot to sit. Now that they'd found one, a quiet little bench near the statue of Someone the Wise –Jayda hadn't been paying attention to the plaque when she'd walked by, either- they were having issues with their fellow pedestrians.

Four times now, a mother or a little old lady or a police officer had marched up and reproached Yuriy, saying, and here Jayda quoted, "For _shame_, keeping your girlfriend out so late in the evening when there's a serial killer around!"

All four women had blatantly ignored Jayda's protests that Yuriy was _not_ her boyfriend, thank you, only to turn around and scold _her_ with a disapproving, "And _you_, young lady! Your poor mother is probably worried sick about you! In my day, girls _listened_ and stayed _home_ when there was trouble in town!"

Good _lord_.

Sighing, Jayda sipped at her coffee, catching movement out of the corner of her eye. It was an older mother, with three kids ranging from around four years old to eight years old running around, and she was making an ominous bee-line for the two redheads.

"... Here comes another one." Jayda warned her companion unnecessarily; Yuriy had probably noticed the woman before she had. Swirling the contents of the paper coffee cup around with a rolling motion of her wrist, she sighed and wondered aloud, "Is a bit of peace and quiet too much to ask for?"

"Says the one who wanted to go to a bar." Yuriy answered without rancour, and there was a trace of amusement in his voice.

"Well, we're not at the bar, thanks to your Jedi mind tricks." Jayda rejoined, not at all unkind or ill-amused. Over the rim of her cup, she added with a smile, "We're in a park long past nightfall, when most sane people should be asleep or at home, and I want peace and quiet, damn it!"

Yuriy snorted at that, and shook his head slightly, finishing off his own rapidly cooling coffee.

A thought occurred to Jayda, and in her typical fashion, she voiced it without giving it much consideration. "I wonder why they all think you're my boyfriend...?"

Belatedly, she realized what a stupid question that was, because it was so _obvious_. She turned to try to make some kind of smooth recovery from her inner-blonde moment, but she never got the chance.

To her complete and utter surprise, her Russian companion _laughed _-not just a chuckle, or a snort, or anything like that, either! She was witnessing an actual, honest to god, head-thrown-back-shiny-teeth-showing-Adam's-apple-bobbing _laugh_. He had a _nice_ laugh, too, damn it all, a cluster of smooth baritone notes in a full-on belly laugh.

Wow... Was the coffee _drugged_?

It sounded rough at the edges, rusty, like he hadn't laughed properly in a long time, but it made her smile without realizing it, because she found she rather liked hearing him laugh, even as he quickly began to calm himself down. Within moments, he had quieted down to chortles, then chuckles, and then possibly the most relaxed, lazy smirk she'd ever seen on his face.

His turned his white-blue eyes on her, lazy smirk still in place and a flicker of something light and mischievous in his eyes, and quirked an eyebrow at her, even as she felt warm and she didn't even try to battle a persistent tug on her smiling lips quickly turned into a grin, wide and unabashed.

"Okay, stupid question. Shush!" And, hell, she was chortling, too, because it was like that dinner at the restaurant all over again, and she didn't _mind_ the sudden change in behaviour, because he'd answered almost all of her questions without even knowing it.

When the mother with the three kids finally made it over to them, they didn't hear a word she said, just nursing the remains of their coffee and sharing amused glances now and then, which only served to further vex the stranger in the midst her motherly tirade.

Jayda tried to hide a smile on the lip of her coffee cup as she finished her mocha, if only for the sake of the mother's poor heart, but her eyes met his again and it didn't really work.

Maybe failing at insomnia and then getting Yuriy's special brand of sleep therapy weren't such bad things after all.

* * *

A/N: Hey guys! Just out of curiosity, do you actually _like_ this style of writing, or do you prefer full-chapter type stories?


	47. Hands

**[Hands]**

Unsurprisingly, after that night in Wiseman's Park, Yuriy had become withdrawn once more. Jayda had half-expected it, to be honest; it wasn't in the Russian's character to be so open -not even, she suspected, with his own roommates.

With one day left until Ivan and the others returned from their hunting trip (and Jayda finally moved out), they'd reverted back to the way things had been... well, before -before the park, before dinner, before hot cocoa and insomnia and crazy reporters... all the way back to that first day in the elevator. Back to awkward and not-quite-hostile, she guessed; they hadn't spoken much since they came back from the park.

It was _awful_.

There wasn't much she could do about it though, so Jayda simply sighed, rubbing absent-mindedly at the thin scar on her thumb as she sat on the living-room couch and channel-surfed. It was Sunday, which meant that there was absolutely nothing worth watching beyond religious programs, kids' shows, and really bad movies –the news stations notwithstanding.

Another sigh. Here she was, with nothing to occupy herself with, a roommate who wasn't interested in talking, and a boat full of awkwardness to boot. Fun.

She jumped when a pair of hands settled on her shoulders from behind, craning her neck to find herself staring up at Yuriy. He wasn't looking at her, however, lifting one hand to reach forward and slip the remote control from her fingers. Wordlessly, he turned the TV off, tossing the remote aside, and glanced down at her.

"You're doing it again." He told her, and there was an undertone in his voice that she couldn't quite identify.

Confused, she asked, "Doing what again?"

"Sighing." The Russian answered, somewhere between curt and blunt. His white-blue eyes were narrowed dangerously when he added, "Stop it."

"Why?" Jayda blurted out, blinking, not liking the narrowed eyes and the terse tone.

"The last time you sighed like that, I found you half-out of your mind from sleep-deprivation in the hallway. You are not allowed to _relapse_."

For a long while, Jayda couldn't think of anything to say to that, staring up at the redhead who was half-leaning and half-looming over her, one hand curled around her shoulder while the other had relocated to the back of the couch. Their faces couldn't have been more than a few inches apart, and that was almost as awkward as Yuriy's reversion to the way things used to be when she'd first moved in.

At length, she murmured, "You have a very strange way of showing that you care, you know?"

His reaction wasn't what she'd expected. Instead of staring at her like she'd grown a second head or recoiling or ignoring her, he stayed as he was, looming overhead, head turned just-so to watch her face. He watched her watching him for about seven heart beats, by her count, until the muscles at the corner of his mouth twitched a little and he moved away.

As Yuriy disappeared from her line of sight, she smiled a little to herself.

Well, now, maybe things weren't quite as awful as she'd thought.


	48. Imagine

**[Imagine]**

The boys greeted her with their usual enthusiasm when they returned –Sergei with a nod, Boris with a grunt, and Ivan with... well, Ivan didn't so much as greet her as lock eye with her for about two seconds before launching into a story of boar-hunting gone hilariously wrong.

As the three unpacked and bustled about, making more of a ruckus than Jayda had ever heard them make, Jayda ducked her head and smiled to herself, something that was only a little amused and more out of fondness that she'd ever actually admit to. Without prompting, Jayda went about helping with unpacking –in what minimal form she was permitted, anyway. All four of the Russians were touchy about people handling their stuff, she'd gathered.

Or, at least, if anyone managed to stick around long enough (read survived) and handled their things, it wouldn't end well.

That sounded about right to Jayda, anyway. She could be wrong though. It happened often enough.

"So, good time, then?" The Canadian asked as Ivan finished his story –apparently, the branch Boris had been sitting on had decided to mutiny and break at the worst possible second, leaving Boris within charging distance of a very unhappy boar... and, if Jayda had heard correctly, Boris may have punched the boar out.

Like, Falcon-Punch'ed it.

That was possibly the funniest mental image Jayda had ever come up with –and also one of the most terrifying.

Ivan snorted, which the redhead assumed to be a positive response and turned to eye her speculatively. "You ever hunt, or do they not let you do that back in Canada?"

Jayda shrugged her shoulders noncommittally, ignoring the sarcastic barb in much the same way she ignored all of Ivan's barbs. "Once or twice. Mostly deer and moose. Duck once, but some bugger shot my decoy duck and we got into a bit of a punch-up –scared off all of the game in the area, if I remember correctly."

"Yeah?" Ivan had a snarky, amused glint in his eye. "Who won?"

Jayda made a show of looking insulted. "You have to _ask_? 'Course I won."

"Huh." Ivan looked surprised. Yuriy looked more than a little sceptical. Boris' expression was flat-out disbelieving. Sergei merely raised a condescending eyebrow.

"...Well, I might have tripped over a root and fallen into the pond –but that was definitely _after_ I won!" Jayda admitted, rubbing awkwardly at the back of her neck and not doing much to hide her embarrassment. At this juncture, there didn't seem to be much point. Besides, trying not to look embarrassed usually only meant that Ivan mocked her more viciously about it than usual.

"_There_ we go!" Ivan said, as if that was the final and crucial piece of puzzle falling into place. All expressions of scepticism and disbelief shifted into ones of faint exasperation and the sort of look one might give a particularly slow puppy after its run into the wall for the umpteenth time. "There had to be something."

"_Aw_, I missed you guys, too." Jayda cooed sardonically, making a point of patting Ivan on the head condescendingly as she walked by. With the others back, she figured it was high time to move some of her stuff back to her own apartment.

Ivan called her something unprintable and, in the background, Yuriy seemed to only _just_ refrain from rolling his eyes. Of course, she could be imagining things.

While she was acknowledging the figments of her imagination, the redheaded Canadian also felt that there was an unspoken "We're glad to see you're back to normal now" hanging in the air as she tucked her comforter under one arm and her pillow under the other and moseyed on over to her slightly dusty apartment.


	49. Invasion

**[Invasion]**

Jayda knew something was off the moment she stepped into her apartment.

It wasn't something specific –no particular smell or sound- that set the little man in the back of her mind off, waving his big red flag about frantically and screaming, "Pay attention!" at her. It was just a sudden, pervasive feeling of _not right_. Cautiously, keeping her front door open in case she needed to make a quick retreat to Yuriy and co.'s (preferably to hide behind one of them) Jayda proceeded further into her apartment. She made a point of giving each room she passed by a quick once over, not at all comfortable with leaving an unexplored room at her back when the little man with the flag was going berserk in her head. The further she progressed into her home, the worse things looked.

Not that there was a much in the way of a mess but everything had been _moved_.

The picture frame with the photo of her family all clustered together and smiling –it had been her sister's graduation ceremony, Jayda remembered- was facing the wrong way. So had the frame with her prom photo, and the portraits of her parents and her best friend back in Canada. The cushions -one blue and one green- that rested on the couch had switched places, and the throw blanket wasn't folded the way Jayda normally did it, so that the little tag with the washing instructions wasn't showing.

One or two of the drawers on her dresser were partially open. Her remaining sheets and pillows were askew. Jayda was fairly certain that the bathroom drawers had been rifled through, as well.

The breadbasket on the kitchen counter had moved two feet from where it should have been, and the vase of flowers –flowers that probably should have been dead by that point- was empty and in the sink.

Her laptop, which Jayda had turned off and left on her coffee table, was open, turned on, and sitting on her kitchen table.

There was a note sitting on the touchpad of her laptop.

She could actually _feel_ the blood drain from her face. It wasn't a pleasant sensation.

Backing up to the doorway, shaken and feeling a little sick to her stomach, Jayda gingerly set the folded comforter and pillow she'd been carrying down by her door and made a panicked beeline for her neighbours'.

The door opened after her first knock, revealing Ivan, mouth already opened to say something that was probably snarky and almost definitely rude. Beyond the short Russian, by the archway to the kitchen, Yuriy had turned his head slightly away from Boris, who he seemed to be in the middle of a conversation with, to look at her. White-blue eyes narrowed, and Boris' dark eyes followed the man's line of sight. Sergei wasn't visible, but she thought she could hear him moving around as well.

"Uh, guys," Jayda spoke, her voice not quite shaky but subdued enough to forestall whatever comment Ivan had planned on throwing at her. "Someone's been in my apartment."


	50. Inspection

**[Inspection]**

There was a pregnant pause following that announcement. Ivan shifted, not uncomfortably but in the sort of edgy way Jayda herself did when she was anticipating a punch-up.

"Are you sure?" Ivan asked, unnecessarily. "I mean, you were pretty loopy for a while there..."

Jayda nodded dumbly, not trusting herself not to squeak or something equally undignified if she spoke.

You know that phrase "to have your heart in your throat"? Jayda had always thought it was a rather stupid phrase, all things considered. Now, however, she knew exactly how accurate that description was –of the way all of the muscles and tendons of her throat pulsed painfully with her heartbeat, fast and panicked, of the way her ribcage seemed to get small and constricted somehow, her head fuzzy and a touch too light on her shoulders...

The boys moved faster than she'd anticipated –no standing still trapped in a moment of shocked mental processes for them. The response was immediate and frightfully efficient. Ivan was the first through the floor, followed immediately by Boris. The bulkier of the two went through the open door and further into Jayda's apartment while the shorter paused by the threshold and began to examine the door –the locks, Jayda realized somewhere in the part of her brain that was still actually functioning. Sergei was next, but he didn't pass her by. Instead, he paused at the threshold of the Russians' apartment, and gave her an evaluating look.

Jayda blinked up at the laconic man dumbly, almost having to crane her neck to meet his eyes. He seemed to know that, at that moment, her brain wasn't functioning at full capacity –shock, fright, and a deep sense of violation had shut down the more complex mental operations already. He was not a man given to speech in the first place, thankfully, nor was speech required just then. Grasping the Canadian's smaller shoulder firmly –with only a quarter-second pause to process just how small she was compared to him- he lifted the redhead from the floor, turned, and deposited the girl within the bounds of the apartment. The redhead didn't so much as blink, simply staring at him with a vaguely lost expression –but there was a glint of something, of the higher brain starting to function once again, behind her eyes.

Good. Silent and stupid wasn't a good look for her.

Yuriy came next, with an expression Jayda had never seen on his face. The muscles along his jaw and cheekbones, the ones that had always seemed a little tense to her before were now stony, eyes gone flinty and cold –like with the stitches, she thought suddenly- and lips pressed into a thin, distinctly unhappy line. He raised a hand with a sweep that lacked the usual smoothness and economy of movement that was so characteristic of the man, index finger extended, hovering just below her nose, while all other fingers were curled. His knuckles were white, and he told her in no uncertain terms to _stay put_.

Jayda nodded, wordless, and watched the taller redheaded man all but stalked into her apartment, barking orders at the other three and receiving almost mechanical reports. What the interrogatives and responses were, Jayda could make out as the three converged somewhere beyond her line of sight. She could make out the odd word, but while her mental faculties were coming back online, her ability to understand rapid, complex strings of Russian was not at all operational.

Feeling lost, Jayda shuffled over to the couch and sat down, propped up on her knees by her elbows, forehead resting on her joined hands. Her hair, loose for once, fell in a curtain around her face, and the Canadian set about trying to slow her heartbeat and think logically.

Someone had been in her home. When? It seemed likely that whoever the intruder was, he –or she, Jayda reminded herself that a woman was just as capable of doing creepy shit as a man was- would have had ample time while Jayda had been undergoing her(only partially) forced sleep therapy. Before that would have been extremely unlikely –she may have been "loopy," as Ivan put it, but Jayda hadn't been so out of it that she wouldn't have noticed her things being moved around.

More importantly, who would have the motive to invade her home like that? One of Andreyev's fans, or close friends who might hold a grudge against her –for reasons Jayda could not, for the life of her, comprehend- might have done it. But that had been some time ago, almost a half a year, in fact, so perhaps not.

Beyond that, Jayda really didn't have too many enemies. She made a point of being polite and amiable to everyone at the very least, or charming and gregarious even, if she was in a good mood. She tended to befriend at least a few of the peers in each of her classes, and the professors if possible. They were alright, Jayda thought with only a distant sort of fondness. It was the low-level staff that she liked best, the security guards and the cleaning staff she encountered between her classes and after hours. Semyon, one of the lab assistants, always snuck her one of those apple-fritter doughnuts from the staff lunchroom, and Kolya, the security guard, always asked interesting questions about her research papers –the kind that made her think. Sveta, the receptionist for the Psychology Department, kept Jayda up-to-date on all of the inter-departmental gossip and Yulia, a young barista in an on-campus coffee shop, liked to trade tea for help with her math homework.

Mind you, Jayda probably would have helped Yulia out for free, and Semyon's doughnuts weren't at all necessary, but Yulia felt guilty otherwise and Semyon wouldn't take no for an answer.

Jayda sighed. No, she didn't have any real enemies. Not that she knew of, anyway.

The sound of a door being closed and the faint whisper of footsteps over carpet interrupted Jayda's thoughts, then, and she straightened, absent-mindedly flicking her hair out of her face. The four Russians appeared... not quite grim, but close. Yuriy was holding the note between his finger and thumb, flinty eyes and a sort of restlessness in the lines of his body the only indications of the anger she'd witnessed earlier. His face, always controlled and ever-so-slightly tense, had a hardness to it now, a sharpness she wasn't used to. He'd been attractive before –very much so, if Jayda was honest- but there was a sort of viciousness beneath it now that turned attractiveness into something feral and wolf-like.

The anger wasn't directed at her, Jayda knew that. If it had been, she wouldn't be in their apartment –and probably not alive, either.

Jayda hadn't read the note –had only sensed danger and gotten the hell out of dodge. Now, though, she could see the big, blocky letters.

It read: _'See you soon.'_


	51. Security Blanket

**[Security Blanket]**

The Moscow police were... less than useful, Jayda learned. They took the note, dusted for fingerprints, asked the usual questions –things like "Do you have any enemies?" or "Have you noticed anyone following you lately?" and "Has anything like this happened before?" and other such useless things.

One of the officers present–called _after_ Yuriy and the others wiped their fingerprints off of most of the surfaces in her apartment; they'd agreed that it would be best to at least have a police record of the incident- had interviewed her about Andreyev's murder earlier in the year. What was his name...? Anton? Yes, that was it. Anton.

If Jayda had a type, Anton was the opposite; top-heavy, pretentious, and thick as two short planks. The sort that had muscles on his muscles for no other reason than he worked out compulsively, had more than a few anger problems, and didn't understand the difference between calculus and algebra.

That's not to say he was a bad cop, per se, but Jayda was sick to death of the flirting. Was it even kosher to flirt on a crime scene? Probably not.

"If you feel at all unsafe, call me and I'll drop by and have a look around, alright?" Anton was saying. From anyone else, that might have been reassuring, but when it was thrown together with Anton's smarmy smile and the not-so-subtle way he leaned forward and crowded her space, it had quite the opposite effect.

Agitated and already deeply disturbed by the fact that her apartment didn't feel at all secure anymore, Jayda jerked her thumb over her shoulder, indicating her Russian neighbours, and deadpanned, "I'd feel safer with this lot, thanks. Don't worry about it –I'm fine."

False, angry bravado. Quite frankly, Jayda was about one sudden movement in her peripheral vision away from bolting and jumping on the first plane back to Canada.

Anton frowned, dark eyes showing a mix of disappointment and annoyance, and glanced over her shoulder. Jayda wasn't sure what her boys were doing back there, but Anton's pupils constricted rapidly, and his face grew a few shades paler. Suddenly, the detective who couldn't stay _out_ of her personal bubble couldn't keep far enough away from it, because Anton stayed on the other side of the room for the rest of the perfunctory investigation.

A lower level officer –Jayda wasn't familiar with the rankings within the police- told the Canadian that they'd be in touch about the findings, and then the small crew of forensic specialists and detectives left.

As Jayda moved to clean the mess the police had left in their wake, she heard Yuriy and Ivan talking quietly by the front door. What they were deliberating, she wasn't sure, and Jayda had enough respect for her neighbours to refrain from listening in -_despite_ the nearly overwhelming temptation. She had bigger concerns at the moment, like the way all of the shadows in every corner of her apartment seemed to shift and every creaking floorboard and squeaky door hinge set off alarms in her mind.

A thought, like a glint of silver in the dark, flashed through her mind as she surveyed her apartment. 'This was mine before, but now it isn't; this isn't my home anymore.'

Her shoulders were hunching unconsciously, an instinctive reaction to make herself smaller, to curl in on herself and pretend to be invisible. The initial paralyzing alarm she'd felt upon discovering that her apartment had been violated had faded now, leaving in its wake a thing with deep-roots and a insidiousness that threaded tendrils around her nerves and pulled them taut, fragile though they were. Jayda shivered and wrapped her arms about her middle in a vain attempt to stave off the cold, despite the fact that it was perfectly warm in her apartment.

"You going to be alright?" Ivan asked. It had gone quiet in the open space of Jayda's living room, so the abruptness of his voice jostled already frail nerves. To her credit, Jayda didn't jump, but there was no mistaking the barely contained flinch, even if her back was to the Russian.

Jayda turned to find that Yuriy had left –she could hear his voice drifting over through the hallway- and Ivan seemed to have stationed himself at the threshold of her apartment. He was eyeing her with a calculating sort of look –not quite like Sergei had, earlier, and not quite like Yuriy usually did, but somewhere in between. A sort of realization hit her then, though it was something she had always known in the back of her mind; her boys were smart. Not just _smart_-smart, though -the kind of smart that scared the bejeezus out of anyone with a dribble of sense.

_Her boys_. Jayda snorted inwardly, despite the state she was in. Fortunately for her, Jayda had been reliably informed by both of her parents that she didn't posses so much as a lick of sense, never mind a dribble.

Feeling her lips quirk upwards weakly, Jayda shrugged and shook her head. "Maybe. In a bit."

Ivan snorted and waved her over. "You need to get drunk."

"W-Wha-uh, I don't-uh-" Jayda started, thrown off balance.

She never got drunk. Ever. In fact, she'd never _been_ drunk before. She drank, yes, but she never went farther than mildly tipsy –not at home, not at clubs, and _never_ with her neighbours. She got cuddly and... excessively affectionate when she had too much to drink, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that wouldn't really be okay with any of her neighbour under any circumstances. While she'd never said anything about that to the quartet, they'd always left her alone when she stopped drinking before them. In fact, it had gotten to the point where they knew the exactly how much she'd drink before she turned her glass over on its coaster and stop for the night and would have a drink countdown -filled to the brim with Ivan's scathing mockery, of course.

"Don't question it –you're getting drunk."

"I really don't think-" Jayda tried.

Ivan interrupted her, grabbing her wrist with a grip that Jayda knew better than to even try and break. "Trust me, you need it."

"But-!" Jayda protested even as she was pulled out of her apartment and into the Russians'. There was already an impressive array of alcohol on the coffee table, shot glasses included, and Jayda was suddenly deeply concerned for the Russians' livers.

"Fine, don't get drunk –but you're staying anyway." Ivan argued back with the sort of finality that Jayda was used to hearing from Yuriy, out of the four. A well placed tug on her wrist as Jayda was led towards the couch had her half-falling, half-stumbling onto 'her spot' –the middle of the couch, between Ivan and Yuriy, seemed to be assigned to her at this point.

Jayda blinked, finding four sets of eyes on her as Ivan's words sank in.

"_Oh_." She said, comprehension dawning. Getting drunk wasn't the objective; keeping her within direct line of sight, however, was.

Why... well, technically speaking, Jayda supposed the 'why' was irrelevant. Regardless of whether they were doing it because they gave a damn or because they didn't want her flipping out in the middle of the night –or, _god forbid_, throwing her brand new sleeping schedule off. That last one alone might put Yuriy's blood pressure through the roof.

"And the light bulb _finally_ blinks on!" Ivan proclaimed sarcastically, throwing his hands in the air.

Yuriy, to her right, sat with one arm running along the back of the couch, the lines of his body far more relaxed than they had been earlier, but not enough to fool Jayda. His eyes had lost the flinty quality they'd possessed before, but they were still sharp, still calculating, and his face was still a little too tense, too vicious. Things were not all better, would not be all better for some time, and Yuriy was not a happy camper. Jayda suddenly wished she'd never run to them –to Yuriy- because they'd already done so much for her, had been so tolerant of her when it was almost against their nature to let others in. Guilt showed in her eyes, she knew it did, and she knew it was entirely too visible to the leader of the strange quartet from across the hall.

She opened her mouth to say something –to apologize and apologize and apologize and probably not stop apologizing- but he pressed a glass of what Jayda guessed was probably a rum and coke into her hand and, in that familiar drawl Jayda had come to know so well, advised, "Get comfortable."

_You're staying put_.


	52. Clue Card

**[Clue Card]**

Somewhere between switching from rum-and-cokes to cognac (possibly not the smartest decision in the world, but those were nothing new to Jayda), the Russians began asking questions; casually enough at first, and then more aggressively. Jayda wasn't oblivious to it –she knew _exactly_ what they were doing, plying her with alcohol and looking for the details she hadn't given to the police- but she went along with the ploy anyway. Why? Because, for some absolutely magical reason, Jayda figured the Russians were more competent than Detective '_Call-Me'_ Anton and... Well, she trusted them. This, potentially, was a very, very, phenomenally stupid thing to do, she knew, but true nonetheless.

"Any idea who it could have been?" Ivan asked, sipping at a shot of vodka that he normally would have downed. They others weren't drinking as per usual either; they wanted to be sober and alert for the time being, it seemed.

Jayda shook her head, feeling a pleasant buzz and figuring that after this last drink, she'd put her trusty self-restraint to good use. "No. Andreyev's groupies come to mind –and, for the life of me, I still don't know how he even _has_ groupies- but they're not exactly subtle, and they've been leaving off recently."

Sergei nodded, processing this for a moment before inquiring, "Break up with anyone recently?"

Jayda made a face, not surprised by the question so much as silently lamenting her failure of a love life (such as it was), and answered dispassionately, "Nope. Not dating right now."

"You stopped dating?" Ivan seemed surprised.

Jayda felt a bit insulted. So what if she'd stopped dating? That was perfectly normal. She was a young, healthy girl –it wasn't like there was anything _wrong_ with her. Some girls didn't start dating until _after_ getting a degree, for god's sake! She could totally stop dating whenever the hell she wanted. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her social life revolved around her neighbours and her schoolwork nowadays! _God_.

Oh dear ...That was the alcohol talking. Time to stop drinking, Jayda, honey –before you actually _say_ something like that out loud, the Canadian thought, eyeing the remainder of her cognac warily. "Couple months ago."

"Huh. Guess you're not as co-dependent as we thought."

"I love you too, Ivan." Jayda cooed sarcastically.

It was Ivan's turn to make a face then –and an impressive one, at that. Jayda couldn't stop the giggle that bubbled up in her chest and slipped out. Then she frowned and set her glass down on the coffee table. Yep, too much cognac.

Boris turned to Sergei and held his hand out. "Hand it over."

Sergei muttered something incomprehensible and possibly unprintable, leaning over to one side to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. Jayda stared in bewilderment as Sergei handed over a sizeable amount of cash and Boris grinned triumphantly.

Yuriy, seeming to take pity on the confused Canadian, leaned over and murmured, "They were betting on whether or not you could handle cognac –Boris bet you couldn't."

_Thanks_, Boris, Jayda thought sardonically, raising an eyebrow and feeling distinctly unimpressed by the whole thing.

Ivan brought things back on topic, speaking slowly, "So, no new ex-boyfriends, no angry groupies hanging around... run into anyone strange or creepy lately?"

"N-" Jayda began, only to pause. Stop. _Remember_. "Wait."

"What is it?" Yuriy asked, eyes narrowed, but Jayda was already up and moving –her balance and coordination only slightly affected by the alcohol in her blood- and halfway out the door.

Her purse! Where was it? Jayda walked into her apartment –left unlocked; stupid, but she hadn't thought of it when Ivan was dragging her over- and started looking in the usual places she dumped her handbag. A quick survey revealed that it was nowhere to be found, and Jayda nearly had a heart attack until she realized that, _duh_, it was at Yuriy's. Wheeling around, almost running into Boris, who had followed her over, she backtracked to her neighbours' and immediately located it next to her Sketchers.

Scooping the oft-abused bag up and setting it on the kitchen table, much to the Russians' general bemusement, Jayda undid the zipper and began rifling through it. She had a ridiculous amount of stuff in her purse, the redhead belatedly realized, and it was no good finding something to small and thin in such a mess –not with just blindly feeling around for roughly the right shape and texture. Muttering to herself, she started pulling bits of purse-'debris' out.

"Well, she's not drunk..." Ivan commented uncertainly, probably wondering what the hell she was doing.

Sergei frowned, and murmured. "She's a _little_ drunk."

"She's fine." Yuriy cut in, eyes tracking her movements. It was kind of creepy, knowing someone was watching everything you were doing without even having to look up and check. Creepy and strangely ... normal, Jayda supposed. At least, it was at this point.

One iPod, three different packs of gum, a cell phone, a wallet, a pair of gloves, three tubes of lipstick (one of which she'd been looking all over the place just the other day), a travel-sized bottle of Tylenol, a handful of receipts, her keys, and a pocket-sized Russian phrasebook (not that she needed that anyway) later, and Jayda finally found what she was looking for.

A small, plain business card.

...On the back, a number and a comment ('Call me if you change your mind') were written in a familiar, blockish font.

With a hand that only slightly trembled, Jayda lifted the card from the depths of her purse, holding it between her index finger and thumb and feeling her skin crawl, starting from her fingertips and creeping up her arm like a legion of six-legged ants. Trying not to look at it too much, Jayda swallowed –thankfully not audibly- and held the card out to Yuriy.

"Yeah," The Canadian finally answered the question. "This guy."

* * *

**A/N:** The plot thickens! Also, I'd like to give a shout out to my wonderful reviewers and watchers -you guys are awesome! I love the feedback!


	53. Drawing A Blank

**[Drawing a Blank]**

The card read, "Alexei Jovovich, Ph. D" and listed an office phone number and address. Wordlessly, Yuriy examined it, taking note of the handwriting and contact information, and then passed it along to the others.

When the quartet pressed her for a description, she struggled to remember the man. After her short encounter with the man, Jayda had dismissed him as trivial –a bit creepy, but not worth worrying about- and had nearly forgotten about the supposed professor.

She sifted through her memory, looking for details –height, approximate weight, hair colour, eye colour, distinctive features, and so on. It took a few long moments for the pieces to come together, but at length, the Canadian answered, "Tall, maybe six-one... dark hair, dark eyes –I don't remember the colour- and I think maybe forty-ish. Nothing really distinctive about his face –had his nose broken once or twice, maybe..."

Jayda trailed off, trying to remember if there was anything else. Yuriy and the others watched her carefully, but she only shrugged and finished apologetically, "He was just sort of generally creepy. I'm sorry, I don't really remember anything else."

"So you only met this Jovovich once?" Ivan wanted to know, turning the card over in his hands.

"Yes." Jayda paused, frowning, brow furrowing as something occured to her. "... But his name wasn't Jovovich, and he wasn't a professor."

_That_ got their attention.

"Clarify." Yuriy spoke, voice firm. There was an edge underneath that familiar drawl, sharp and new and completely in line with every other behaviour she'd seen from the man that day.

"Uh, well..." Jayda shifted, feeling uncomfortable and somewhat excessively scrutinized. "Professors don't give out cards to students, usually. And he thought I was in the biology faculty, which I'm not. He said something about needing volunteers for a study, too, I think, but I wasn't really... paying attention."

Why, oh _why_, did saying that last bit make her feel like a horrible, irresponsible, _stupid_ little kid?

"And his name?" Yuriy pressed. She had his complete and undivided attention, and it was making her seriously identify with some ant under a magnifying glass on a sunny day. It gave her a funny squirmy feeling that sat low in her belly, too, and the combination left her wanting to crawl under the table and hide for a bit.

Jayda opened her mouth to respond, but then... _Shit. What the hell was it?_

"I... I don't remember."

She was drawing a blank. Feeling the nervous energy spawned by her epiphany leave her with a heavy sigh, she leaned against the bar-counter that was part of the wall separating the kitchen from the living room, at a complete loss. She could remember what the man looked like, could remember that she'd told him push off almost as soon as she'd met him, but the one thing that eluded her was the first thing he'd told her!

The Russians glanced at each other significantly, something unspoken passing between them.


	54. Mystery

**[Mystery]**

The next few days were a flurry of activity for Jayda –and not the good kind. She oversaw the replacement and installation of several new locks for the doors and windows for her apartment and switched to a more comprehensive alarm system –something which Ivan none-too-subtly observed under the pretence of asking what she wanted to watch during their biweekly movie night. Not commenting on the way the shorter man watched the workers with narrowed, calculating eyes, (which made the poor locksmith all kinds of nervous, the poor man) Jayda selected a zombie movie that she knew wouldn't freak her out too much.

The last thing she needed right then was to give herself nightmares over a stupid movie.

When the job was completed, and the various handymen and locksmiths paid and sent on their merry way, Jayda made a point of checking everything twice and tested the alarm system. Once those had passed with nothing less than flying colours, Jayda set about her next projects –rearranging everything.

It probably would have sounded silly to anyone else, but to Jayda it made perfect sense. Her apartment felt strange and weird because of something that was out of her control. That was unacceptable. So, instead, why not make her apartment weird and strange because of something she _could_ control?

Unfortunately, Jayda had forgotten how heavy some of her furniture was –and, since she absolutely refused to ask her neighbours for anymore help, that left the Canadian with a few logistical issues. Still, by the end of it, with a lot of cursing and swearing and entirely too much effort, she got it done. Most of the furniture was just rotated around the room by thirty something degrees, give or take, while some things were turned around or rearranged. Pictures and knick-knacks were rearranged, some put away and others that had previously lived in a box underneath her bed were brought out. The TV stayed put, of course, –like hell she was lugging that great big thing around _again_; she'd had enough trouble the first time around- and there really wasn't anywhere else to put her bed or the kitchen table, but beyond that, Jayda was fairly satisfied with the results.

Pity she wasn't allowed to paint her apartment, though. That could have been fun.

Flopping onto her couch –actually, almost flopping onto the floor because it wasn't where it used to be- with a happy sigh, Jayda threw an arm over her eyes, the other over her stomach, and settled down for a nap.

Or, rather, she would have settled down for a nap if it hadn't been for the sharp rapping at her door. Scowling, running a hand through her hair to make it half-way presentable, Jayda rolled off of the couch and stumbled over to the door.

"It's me." The recognizable drawl of Yuriy's voice announced as Jayda approached.

Slipping the chain off of its track and undoing both the old deadlock and the new one, Jayda opened the door and smiled a weary, crooked smile. "Hi."

The Russian stood to one side of the doorway, leaning forward slightly with one hand braced high on the doorframe, and he was staring directly into her eyes. This in and of itself wasn't unusual; unlike North Americans, Jayda had noticed that most Russians had a thing about maintaining eye contact to the point where it was a little off-putting –to Jayda, at least.

What _was_ a little unusual, however, was the not-quite-smirk on the man's face. Yuriy was not one for expression, after all, though the odd thing did slip through.

"Rearranged the furniture?" He asked, though he made it sound like a rhetorical question, his voice faintly amused. "I thought you might."

"And changed the locks and alarm system." Jayda confirmed.

"_Da_. Ivan told me." The Russian offered, the not-quite-smirk widening just a fraction. "He's heartbroken over having to learn to pick so many new locks."

Jayda snorted, not believing a word of it, and opened the door wider and took a half-step to the side as a wordless offer. "I'm sure Ivan will get over it."

Yuriy straightened, dropping his hand from the door frame, and stepped past her, angling his torso as he moved by to avoid any accidental physical contact. Jayda wasn't terribly offended, merely closing the door behind the Russian and following as he moved into the newly set up living room.

"Coffee?" She offered, watching as her fellow redhead looked around, taking stock of the changes she'd made. Yuriy declined, instead moving to inspect the various locks and windows. Jayda let him –though she couldn't say why.

Shrugging, silently declaring that phenomenon a mystery best left alone, Jayda turned away and helped herself to a cup of coffee. When she turned back, some several moments later, Yuriy was examining the corkboard above her desk, which was pressed up against the wall that opened up from the narrow entrance corridor to the airy living room. Most of what was up there ran along the lines of homework reminders, appointments, important dates, and little notes to herself.

"Who's Mason?" The Russian asked suddenly. He was fingering a post-it note with the words 'SEE MASON A.S.A.P. –IMPORTANT' with several underlines under the last word. Funny, Jayda had never noticed that the man had surprisingly long fingers –elegant, even, which was not a word the Canadian would normally have ever applied to her neighbour.

Jayda shifted slightly, refocusing her eyes on her coffee, and answered slowly, "My doctor."

Yuriy's eyes narrowed, just a little. If Jayda hadn't been watching the man as carefully as she had –and no, she was not going to ask herself _why_ she was paying so much attention to him- she would never have noticed. "He any good?"

"_She's_ very good." Jayda responded, putting a deliberate emphasis on her doctor's gender.

"Is she?" Yuriy prompted with a disinterested overtone to his usual drawl that Jayda didn't believe for a moment. He flipped a few post-it notes up to take a look at the older notes beneath them, pausing for a long moment to examine a reminder to pick up a new prescription. He didn't comment on it, instead asking, "And how do you know that?"

"Let's just say that the thing that I have –my condition," Jayda had to correct herself. She'd made a promise to herself to get her shit together and deal with her issues just a few hours before the others had come back from that hunting trip of theirs, and damned if she wasn't going to keep it, despite everything else that was going on. Part of that promise meant _not _pretending that her condition didn't exist. That was stupid and unhealthy and she was so _done _with that bullshit. "Is... not easy to diagnose unless you're looking for it."

Yuriy nodded and moved away from the corkboard.

Neither of them spoke for a while after that, Jayda leaning against the counter in one corner of her kitchen, sipping at her coffee, and Yuriy finishing up his examination in silence. It was comfortable, in an odd sort of way. It made her suddenly strange and scary apartment a little less... well, strange and scary.

Quietly, she wondered just what it was about Yuriy and the others that was so reassuring.

...That was probably yet another mystery best left alone.


	55. Palpitations

**[Palpitations]**

Jayda glanced up from the newspaper she'd been reading when Yuriy stepped into the kitchen area, heralded by a tiny creak from the linoleum floor. She was still leaning against the countertop and lurking near the burbling coffee pot, mug half-empty on the counter and coffee distressingly tepid.

"All good?" The Canadian asked, setting the newspaper down. She caught Yuriy's affirmative nod as she twisted around to snag the coffee pot from its slot. Topping up her own mug and replacing the glass pot, she turned back and continued, "Good. I was-"

Jayda never finished, mostly because she was suddenly nose to nose with Yuriy. Well, nose to chin, anyway; standing, the top of her head came up to Yuriy's nose, but leaning against the counter as she was placed Jayda a good half an inch lower. She had to lean back a bit to actually make eye contact, one hand bracing against the counter behind her to ease the strain on her muscles, the other hand raised to... do something. Hover in the air uselessly, she supposed absent-mindedly. Slowly, she set it down on the counter to her side, inadvertently brushing against his arm first, and then his hand from where it sat beside her hip and curled against the curved edge of the counter. A quick, mostly involuntary glance revealed that his other hand was in a similar position on her other side.

That was right about when Jayda started to lose her ability to think clearly. Or rationally.

Strangely, she had to fight to maintain eye contact, had to almost strain against the half-instinct to let her eyes drop –to his thin and downturned mouth, to the long-fingered hands that braced against the counter and boxed her in, to the _maybe-a-_quarter-inch of space between the pair of them.

The weird thing was, she could feel –actually feel- the heat coming off the man's body, could just about see the even pulse of the carotid arteries at his throat and even the faint slivers of a warmer blue amidst the familiar white blue of his irises, but they weren't touching. At all. There wasn't a single point of contact anywhere between them, and that seemed fundamentally _wrong_, somehow.

That last bit was the _really_ weird part.

Also, her heart was doing funny things to her pulse that didn't feel even remotely healthy, and her head seemed to have switched brains for warm, fluffy cotton balls –which was actually quite a pleasant feeling, if you weren't a cerebral sort of person. The warm, electric tingle that skittered down her spine when he shifted closed –still not touching- and stared into her eyes in a way that almost convinced the redheaded Canadian that the man might actually be able to see her _soul_ was also a bit of a problem, now that Jayda thought about it.

"I missed this one." Yuriy said suddenly, and, as it turns out, the combination of close proximity and that low drawling voice had a _fantastic_ happy-melty-warmy -insides feeling as a random side effect.

It took Jayda entirely too long to figure out that whatever Yuriy had said was completely out of context with what she was thinking (and, she was a terrible, terrible person for thinking some of the things she was thinking.) Glazed eyes snapped nearly back into focus and the bits of cotton fluff that had replaced her brain started to function marginally.

"Wha-?"

Brain function, mental focus, and whatever question she had planned on asking shut down as Yuriy suddenly got much, much closer, to the point where they actually were touching (although just barely, and nowhere nearly as interesting as she'd hoped somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind). He twisted his torso just a little to the one side, avoiding the vast majority of any possible physical contact so that her shoulder brushed against the underside of his collarbone through his shirt as he... reached behind her? Jayda blinked. _What_?

The scraping sound of a curtain being pushed aside followed by a rattle answered the silent question.

Oh. Okay. Just checking the window... like he'd been doing to _all of the other windows_.

Okey-dokey. That's cool. That's totally cool. Nothing wrong with that. She totally hadn't gotten the wrong idea _at all_.

_God_, she needed to do something about her hormones.

Turning her head to say something snarky –something like "You could have just asked me to move, you jerk"- ended up having mixed results. While Jayda had been berating her overactive hormones, Yuriy had been leaning away from the window. He'd probably turned his head to look at her right around the time Jayda turned to say –rather, fail once again to say- something, and, moving in opposite directions as they were, this resulted in an awkward (and somewhat painful) bumping of noses.

They both froze, Yuriy's eyes pale and half-lidded and hawk-like while hers were wide and faintly panicked and dilated to the point where she could actually _feel_ her pupils straining to widen further (which was a very, very weird sensation, to tell the truth.) Breaths mingled while Jayda's pulse sky-rocketed -and not in a happy-happy-fun-fun sort of way- as her poor abused heart did a frantic little tap-dance in her chest cavity and her lungs protested against the sudden thickness of the air.

A light brushing against her lips, just _barely_, and Jayda was fairly certain she was having palpitations in the _best_ way, but then-

He pulled away, though not quickly, as though he'd been burned, but not slowly or reluctantly either. It seemed, at least to her over-heated bit of fluff for brains, to be a calculated move, a tactical retreat that was less of a retreat and more of a case of relocating to a more advantageous location—

Oh, god, her brain went to horrible, _horrible_ places just then.

Yuriy murmured something about Drinking Night that Jayda couldn't quite decipher, and then he was gone, the door shut firmly behind him.

Jayda's legs wobbled, and she had to cling to the countertop for a long moment, knuckles white and face more than a little flushed. She stared in the direction Yuriy had gone, wondering about a thousand things and nothing all at once. When Jayda trusted her legs to support her properly, she made a decisive beeline for the shower and set the water on its coldest setting.

* * *

**A/N**: After fifty something chapters of waiting, I figured you guys deserved a Yuriy/Jayda cookie.


	56. Super Powers

**[Super Powers]**

As the sky darkened and the usual noise and clamour of Moscow life died down two days after what Jayda referred to as 'The Kitchen Incident,' the Canadian stood in her bathroom, towelling her hair dry and preparing for bed. Her shower earlier had been spent in confused contemplations, interspersed with the occasional flustered recollection and moments of faint melancholy.

Jayda had never had much trouble in the way of finding boyfriends. What she lacked in the aesthetics department, she made up for with charm and a lazy swagger. It's all about confidence –or at least the ability to lie like it's the truth.

Now, _keeping_ her boyfriends –that seemed to be her problem. For whatever reason, the redhead hadn't been able to hang onto a guy for more than two weeks max. Either they lied or they cheated, or they behaved irrationally for no conceivable reason, or they turned out to be just plain _boring_. And, yes, Jayda was of the opinion that it was perfectly acceptable to dump a guy when, while he was nice and treated her well enough and didn't snap at all of her male friends, he was about as exciting as a clod of dirt. Apparently, some people disapproved of that standpoint, but Jayda thought it was perfectly reasonable –why waste her time on someone she wasn't interested in? And why waste that poor bastard's time and give him delusions of interest and reciprocity?

So, for all that Ivan might make the occasional jab at her seemingly endless stream of boyfriends, she actually had very little experience. Two weeks was not long enough to establish a proper emotional bond (for Jayda, at least), and she was not the type for anything even remotely resembling casual sex. Throw in the fact that she tended to find kissing an unpleasant experience (largely due to varying degrees of incompetence or inexperience on her partner's part) and thus had developed a slight aversion to the act, and Jayda was left in a very awkward position-

-Because that thing that had happened in her kitchen? That awkward, strange, spontaneous thing, the not-kiss that was mostly accident and probably really _not_ because Yuriy didn't _do_ accidents and Yuriy didn't _do_ spontaneous, had achieved a far greater affect than what most of the boys ineptly trying to make out with her tonsils could have ever _dreamed_ of accomplishing.

But that's awkward, because it's Yuriy –because Yuriy was... well, let's face it, Yuriy was a bloody wildcard. Not like Boris was a wildcard, of course, but just as unpredictable sometimes. Still, Yuriy was logical; he analysed, saw things most people didn't, processed them, probably plotted out a hundred different courses of action, and then picked the one most likely to produce favourable results. There was always a _point_ to the things he did.

So what was the point of _that_?

Jayda struggled to think logically as she tossed the damp towel onto the smooth countertop, but either she didn't know enough of the male psyche or her logic had some fatal flaw to it, because Jayda couldn't see anything other than the obvious avenue: it was on purpose. There were so many ways that Yuriy could have avoided physical proximity to her that it wasn't even funny, and, upon reflection, many of his movements were strategic and calculated. Whether or not the man had anticipated her turning to say something snarky was irrelevant; everything else was premeditated. Nothing else made sense.

But _why_? It's difficult for her to come to terms with, mostly because, until recently, she'd been working under the assumption that the man didn't have a sex drive.

Evidently, she was wrong.

More importantly, how was she supposed to act now? Was she supposed to... what, get cuddly? Probably not –even when he broke her personal bubble, the amount of actual physical contact between them had been minimal.

So, what, then? Pretend it didn't happen –act normal? Terrible idea. One, there was no way someone (probably Ivan, the cunning, perceptive bastard) wouldn't pick up on the mutual avoidance thing and-

Oh, god, Drinking Night. She was going to have to sit between the pair of them.

Jayda slapped the palm of her hand against her forehead, an impressive grimace on her face. _How_ did she get herself into these situations? If the redhead didn't know better, she might have wondered if trouble and awkwardness were her super powers.

Jayda stared at her reflection, all dark eyeliner and damp hair, and sighed. First the PCOS, then the stitches and the insomnia, and then the break in, and _now_... now she had to deal with this -whatever _this_ was.

Life in Canada had never been as stressful as this, Jayda lamented.

A mutinous set of neurons murmured that it had also never been quite so interesting.

The woman snorted, and abandoned her reflection for bed and a good sleep.


	57. Flicker

**[Flicker]**

On the day before Drinking Night, the cramps set in.

It wasn't that Jayda was looking for sympathy, or that she was the type to whine about cramps and bloating and mood swings and whatever some girls moaned about. Before she'd gone on the pill –Yasmin, to be specific, which was a doctor's go-to treatment for PCOS due to several rather handy side effects- she'd had fairly nasty cramps. Truthfully, when her menstrual cycle had abruptly stopped dead with little to no warning and then stayed that way for eight months, the redhead had actually been a little relieved. And freaking out, of course, because that really wasn't normal -but the relief was there, too.

Post-pill cramps, after her cycles had been forcibly restarted via an injection, were... different, though. Where before there had been simply a broad area of pain, dull and easily ignored with the help of a few painkillers, it was now accompanied by a sharp, persistent, and stabbing pain in her left ovary. Enough so that she could actually pinpoint where, exactly, that part of her internal reproductive organ was –a new and entirely unwelcome sensation. Painkillers couldn't quite dull that knife-like twinge, and there was only so much that herbal tea and a hot water bottle could do.

She didn't even _like _herbal tea, though and, just to add insult to injury, her face was trying to break out; while the pills helped suppress her systemic acne, it wasn't a miracle worker. Fortunately for her, Jayda had a battery of chemicals and topical agents on hand to deal with that particular problem.

Still, on the whole, the Canadian wasn't feeling wonderful. In fact, she felt downright awful.

Was it so surprising, then, that when Ivan walked in (locked doors just swung open of their own accord for him, she swore) late that afternoon, that Jayda was halfway through a tub of rainbow flavoured ice cream and two thirds of the way through 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'?

Ivan thought so.

"What _are_ you watching?" The short man wanted to know, upper lip already curled in disgust and brow furrowed in bewilderment.

"Disney movies." Jayda answered around a spoonful of ice cream. It came out a bit muffled, but Ivan seemed to understand. Belatedly, she offered the tub to the man. If anything, bewilderment shifted to horror at the sight of the acid pinks, blues, and purples of Jayda's comfort food of choice.

With exaggerated caution, Ivan very slowly turned around and walked right out of her apartment. Jayda snorted in amusement and turned back to the scene of Quasimodo rescuing Esmeralda from the pyre, finally fulfilling his epic quota for the movie.

It should probably have bothered her, the way Ivan and the others just broke into her apartment whenever they felt like it, but it kind of didn't... and Jayda figured that maybe it was about time she stopped questioning that. It was just part of who and what they were, along with their laconic tendencies, their unpredictable behaviour, their probably pickled livers and drinking habits, and the way they all kept an eye on her in their own ways. Instead of trying to figure out the 'what's and the 'why's, she was just going to accept it –and try to figure out how to repay them someday.

None of her boys bothered her for the rest of the day, and Jayda wasn't totally sure how to interpret that. Still, keeping her promise to stop picking every little thing they did apart, she let it go and spent the time reviewing textbooks, brewing more tea, and watching more Disney films. Admittedly, once she'd worked her way up to 'The Princess and the Frog,' she'd grown sick of the kitschy plotlines and cardboard cut-out characters and had switched over to kitschy horror movies just before dinner. There was only so much sap that she could handle in one day, after all.

As the credits for 'Aliens vs. Predators: Requiem' were rolling and Jayda was reaching for the clicker, she heard the door open once again and assumed Ivan had recovered from his Disney-induced horror and had returned to mock her with his usual relentlessness. (For all that she bitched about Ivan mocking her all the time, she knew it wasn't malicious; it became less annoying and more endearing every day. She would never admit it, though.)

The problem with Ivan popping by again was that she had set the alarm shortly after dinner (around seven, because she'd gotten caught up in the plot of one movie and hadn't wanted to pause it for dinner at the usual time.) At the time, she'd figured that if the guys hadn't visited by then, then they probably weren't going to. Once again, she was wrong. That happened a lot around her boys –her being wrong...

Tangent, Jayda. _Tangent_. Get back to the alarm.

It wasn't a loud alarm –in fact, it was a silent alarm- so she wasn't surprised that the intruder from across the hall hadn't noticed it. Tossing the hot water bottle aside and quickly getting to her feet, she strode over to the alarm by the front door and punched in the code.

Once the happy beep of a deactivated alarm system rang out, Jayda turned to find Yuriy just inside the doorway, one eyebrow raised. The man's sudden appearance triggered some very uncomfortable squirmy feelings in her stomach, and a whole lot of awkward to boot, but the redhead valiantly maintained a vaguely unimpressed expression.

"Silent alarm." She explained simply, though she was fairly certain the redheaded Russian had already figured that out. Reaching forward to grasp the doorknob, she closed the door behind the taller redhead, and added, "The code is one-eight-seven-four, and if the light beside the screen is green, you've set it off. If you guys are going to keep picking my locks, you might as well know the code."

White-blue eyes met hazel-brown ones, and it was a long moment before Yuriy finally nodded. Jayda, feeling the nervous butterflies in her stomach worsen and sink lower in her belly, broke eye contact first and pivoted on her heel, padding back to her couch and rapidly cooling hot water bottle. She didn't know what to say to the man, or if there was anything that _should_ be said, so she stayed silent and chewed on her lower lip to distract herself from the tingling ghost-sensation upon them.

Yuriy followed her, equally silent, and sat wordlessly on the other end of the low loveseat. When Jayda held up the two DVDs she was considering, figuring it was only polite to let the guest choose. Popping the DVD into the tray and flopping onto her end of the couch, Jayda dropped her now tepid hot water bottle onto the floor, brought her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around her legs. Yuriy had his chin propped up on his fist, the other arm draped along the back of the couch. His hand ended up only about an inch or so from the back of her neck and Jayda tensed.

Little known fact: the back of Jayda's neck was ridiculously sensitive. The last time someone had touched her neck –some muscle-head at a club, and he'd been brushing a loose strand of hair aside- she'd punched the guy in the face. Needless to say, she wasn't allowed back into that club anymore.

Letting her hair down from its messy bun was more of a tactical decision than anything; her hair was thick and fell down to just past her collar bones, and it covered the back of her neck more than adequately.

As the movie progressed, neither of them really spoke. Luckily, the loud sounds of explosions and gunfire of the latest Rambo movie filled the silence, and since this was one of Jayda's favourite films, she nearly forgot about the man beside her and the awkwardness and the strangeness of having him sit not half a foot from her after the Kitchen Incident.

She glanced over at him –just once- during the final scene of the movie, and met cool, familiar eyes, calculating and speculative. His chin was no longer propped up by his fist –rather, his hand was free, two long fingers resting lightly on the edge of his lower lip- and there was something about the angle of his head and the slant of his eyes that did several interesting things to her heart rate. The butterflies returned, low in her belly, as she watched the light from the screen play over the angular lines of his face, the way even the most subtle shift of light seemed to catch the what colour there was in his eyes and either drained it further or intensified it.

Without thinking, the Canadian blurted out the one question that had been hovering over her head like a sword of Damocles. "_Why_?"

The response was as sharp as it was impassive. "While your physiological responses were favourable, your mind was fully functional; you could have stopped me if you had wanted to."

"Okay, yeah," Jayda admitted, breaking eye contact momentarily to offset the sheer level of _awkward_ that she was feeling before coming back with, "But-"

A sharp rap on the door interrupted her, and the redheaded Canadian paused, frowning. Who the hell was knocking on her door at –a quick glance at the kitchen stove clock- half past two in the morning? Shooting a puzzled glance in Yuriy's direction, she motioned for him to stay seated while she got up to investigate.

* * *

**A/N:** It has occured to me that, since the sixth chapter (Seize the Day,) I have done very little to make Jayda's condition part of her day to day life. Since her PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian/Ovaries Syndrome) was a major factor in her insomnia and stress not so long ago, I felt it was necesary to correct this issue. Also, the information here is as accurate and up to date as I can make it.

To explain what PCOS is to the uninformed, doctors have been aware of PCOS, which now goes under two or three different names, for about seventy-five years and still have no idea what causes it or how to cure it. It is currently believed to be passed along through genetics. Some physicians believe that both mother and father can pass the genes on, but I am uncertain of the science behind this statement, as usually only the X chromosome is a carrier, not the Y chromosome.

No two women will have the same symptoms necessarily, and there is no single, standardized way to test for it. The 'string of pearls' mentioned in the original PCOS-centric chapter (where the 'pearls' are actually a ring of cysts within the ovary itself) is not guaranteed to be present in all women with this condition. Likewise, not all women will have the hormone imbalance during the non-menstruating months which usually indicates PCOS, nor will the systemic acne always be present, or the hirsutism (in whatever degree, if present) or the weight issues. Some women will show no symptoms whatsoever, and will only discover their condition when trying to become pregnant and undergoing the obligatory tests and scans. It's a very difficult condition to diagnose, and even when there are indicators, this condition shares traits will several other medical problems at first glance; one must diagnose through process of elimination.

The effects of PCOS on women are equally variable. Some will never have children (without medical assistance) while others will only have difficulty conceiving, and others will have and increased risk of miscarriage. In addition, the condition seems to increase the risk of diabetes, cancer of the uterus, and heart problems. However, the greatest effect tends to be psychological, even in women who did not plan on having children. The more severe the condition, the worse the effects -particularly psychological. On a scale of one to ten, (one being a woman without any symptoms and ten being full on hirsutism, systemic acne, serious weight issues, depression, and cyst-riddled ovaries) Jayda is sitting at a four or five, give or take half a point.

As for the strange cramps Jayda experiences -those stem from my own personal experience with this condition. Yes, I gave Jayda the same condition I have, at about same level of severity. Before anyone starts screaming "Self-insert! Self-insert!" and looking for pitch forks, let me explain why I chose that course of action for Jayda's character.

It was probably one of the few breaches of author/character separation that I have made since my early writing days and, at the time, Seize the Day was more for theraputic purposes than anything else. I had just been diagnosed and was struggling to figure out how I felt about that and how I planned to deal with it. I had not originally planned to post the chapter, and was fully intending to delete the whole thing until a friend of mine suggested that it would be a good way to add more detail and depth to Jayda's character -particularly since I have experience with the condition and, thus, know what I'm talking about. Admittedly, after I decided to stop wallowing in self-pity and deal with my issues like a big girl, the challenge of writing a character who could not sort such issues out as easily as I did really interested me.

You may resume looking for your pitchforks.


	58. Assault and Battery

**[Assault and Battery]**

The knocking had just started up for the second time when Jayda opened the door, this time a little more hesitant. The person on the other side was quite possibly the _last_ person she had expected it to be, and she smelled him before she even saw him. The cologne he had probably just about drowned himself in was a young man's cologne –too strong, too sharp, and applied a little too liberally.

Almost immediately, she had a headache and her mood accordingly soured.

Behold, in all of his short, hunched, and shifty glory –Robert Something-Rather, the American kid from her forensic psychology class. In his hand was a bouquet –a ridiculously large one at that- of lilies, which was promptly shoved into her hands, accompanied by a queasy, nervous smile under thick-framed hipster glasses (which utterly failed to disguise the squinty, shifty eyes) and topped off with oily, ill-taken care of hair.

The important bit of all that? Jayda was allergic to lilies –their pollen, more specifically. Very allergic.

The sneezing fit that followed sent her headache (and mood) from REDCON 4 to REDCON 2, and Jayda started holding the bouquet of colourful death flowers at arm's length while the other hand pressed against the pressure point under her nose in an attempt to stave off further sneezing. The pressure point tactic was only partially successful, but her eyes began itching as though to make up for the reduced sneezing.

Robert waved awkwardly, still smiling that queasy smile of his, and the Canadian abruptly wanted to punch him. In the background, Jayda heard the creak of leather that heralded Yuriy's abandonment of the couch, followed by the quiet rustle of fabric as the Russian approached.

Jayda only knew the guy with the death flowers in the vaguest sense of the word. Her memories of him were mostly of lurking in her peripheral vision during the lectures and asking her annoying questions when she was trying to focus on the professor and take notes in Russian –something that was still difficult for her, for all that she spoke the language fluently. He was a little annoying, but harmless –a sort of painfully earnest, entirely too sincere and socially deficient kind of person. Jayda tolerated Robert, mostly –would answer his questions when she wasn't busy, wouldn't protest to him sitting next to her during a lecture or complain about his unbelievably strong cologne- but that was the extent of it.

"Hi, Jay-Jay! I heard you were a bit down, so I brought you some flowers! 'Cause, you know, I figured you might like them and maybe that would be okay –but if it's not okay, that's totally cool, and if you don't like flowers then that's okay too, because flowers kind of suck, but I hope you like them because -" And there was that too earnest thing that she was talking about, the quiet, anxious desperation to just be cool and accepted that ended up repulsing people rather than drawing them in.

Robert didn't seem to notice the sneezing, or the way that she couldn't decide if she should hold her forehead or her nose, or just claw at her eyes. She was about ten seconds from throwing the bouquet at the squinty-eyed man. Robert did notice _something_, however, stopping abruptly in his ramblings and staring past her. "Oh."

Ten bucks said that Yuriy was standing behind her, probably looking extremely unimpressed.

Taking advantage of the American's momentary speechlessness –a rare and prized thing as far as Jayda was concerned- she half turned to Yuriy and begged shamelessly, "_Ohmygod_ -Yuriy! Get rid of these things!"

"You don't like them? I though girls loved flowers..." Robert's face fell, shoulders hunching and weight shifting back and forth from one foot to the other, and his eyes –a boring sort of brown that did nothing for her whatsoever- took on a kicked puppy quality that would normally have moved Jayda to at least pity the guy. Sadly, REDCON 2 removed all traces of pity from Jayda's brain, which felt like it was currently trying to curl in on itself under the two-sided attack of the cologne and the much-hated lilies.

Yuriy took one look at the state of her face (red, watery eyes, reddening nose, and an overall distressed expression), spared Robert a sort of calculating, scalding glance that lasted all of half a second and ended with a blatant dismissal and a wrinkled nose. Talking the bouquet of death out of her hands, the Russian snorted derisively at the garish combination of yellow, pink and orange, and disappeared into her apartment with the bouquet. In the background, Jayda heard a window open and shut.

Turning back to face Robert, the top of whose head came up to her chin, the Canadian forestalled the American's attempt to start apologizing and, sniffling, held up one finger. Robert's mouth snapped shut with an audible (and vaguely unattractive) clack.

"Okay," She began through clenched teeth, despite the stuffy nose and the watery eyes and the tiny man with a jackhammer inside her skull. "One: never call me _Jay-Jay_. That just makes me want to punch you. A _lot_."

Robert frowned, puppy eyes turning into something petulant, and he opened his mouth to speak again but Jayda wasn't having any of it. Ordinarily, she'd have told the guy to shove off and slammed the door shut, but ordinarily Jayda wasn't assaulted with bad cologne and a bouquet of nothing but the _one_ flower she happened to be horribly allergic to at _two in the morning_. Exceptional circumstances called for exceptional measures, and Jayda was working up to a rant.

"Two: _no, I did not like the flowers_! I'm _allergic_ to lilies –something you would have known if you'd bothered to freaking _ask_! I don't even _like_ flowers!" The redhead forged on waspishly, eyes narrowed dangerously and jabbing the shifty little man with her finger to punctuate her sentences.

"_Oh.._." Robert mumbled, dropping his head and shuffling his feet with an even deeper frown. After so much time with Yuriy and co, the Omega behaviour as a method of gaining pity and second chances (a pattern she recognized well after so many failed boyfriends) just made her angrier. REDCON 2 shifted upwards to REDCON 1.5, well within the danger zone. His voice took on a nasally sort of whine. "Well, I didn't _know_-!"

"Yeah, I _know_ you didn't." Jayda snapped. "And Three: it's _two_-in-the-fucking-_morning _and I was in the middle of a bloody conversation! And how did you even get in here? I sure as hell didn't let you in!"

"Well-" Robert perked up a bit at that and tried for a third time to speak, but by this point, Jayda was seeing three different shades of red. She barely even registered Yuriy's return, though she did distantly notice the not-so-subtle hand on her hip –deliberately placed where the American could see it. The petulant frown on the American's face turned into something outright mutinous.

"Four: GO. _AWAY_."

With all of the panache of an angry grizzly bear, Jayda, pivoted on her heel and stomped over to her bathroom to find herself an allergy pill and a bottle of Tylenol. She left Yuriy to close the door and send Robert on his merry way. Unfortunately, the redhead only made it about three steps from the door when the sound of Robert's voice stopped her dead.

"Hey, _guy_?" The American complained, sounding all of thirteen years old. "That's not cool, dude -I saw her first. You don't just move in on another man's turf like that."

REDCON 1 activated.

Either Yuriy hadn't anticipated her lunge, or he simple didn't care to stop her, because Jayda's had a clear path to Robert. The crunch of bone beneath her fist was strangely satisfying, despite the faint sting of her knuckles and the palm of her hand, but the feeling was short-lived. The Russian was quick to pin her elbows to her waist while Robert gave a (belated) shout, head snapping backwards as his nose –which was, at _best_, badly broken- spurted blood.

"_Jesus Christ_! What the hell's wrong with you?" The short man demanded, voice muffled by the hand over his bloodied nose. His words came out shrill and his body language screamed panic; free arm held away from the body, knees slightly bent and ready to bolt, shoulders hunched even further, and eyes wide with shock.

Neither elbowing and kicking nor scratching and twisting could get her free enough from Yuriy's hold –though, if the muffled Slavic curses were any indication, she was giving the Russian a run for his money. Jayda was tiring quickly though, and saw her chance to put Robert in unreasonable amount of pain dwindling. As a last ditch attempt to get free, the Canadian tried dropping her weight.

Not a smart move, as it turned out. Yuriy had probably seen that one coming a mile off and, instead of trying to hold her up, deliberately let her collapse, using her momentary surprise (and indignation) to pin her arms behind her back with one hand. He headed off any possible kicking or twisting by placing most of his weight over her lower back and the backs of her knees, leaving Jayda effectively immobilized. Wincing in discomfort and silently recognizing that she was probably stuck until Yuriy let her up, Jayda set about taking deep, measured breaths through her nose and calming down. She kept her eyes trained on Robert, though –if only so she could throw dirty looks his way.

Flexing her fingers experimentally proved to have interesting results. The faint stinging she'd noticed earlier around her knuckles was worse now, sharper, and Jayda quickly stopped moving that hand, wondering just what she'd done to her knuckles.

A disgruntled glance at Robert revealed the cause –while she'd mostly punched his nose, she'd also kind of punched his glasses... and broken them. She probably had glass in her knuckles, then, or at least cuts from the glass. As for the palm of her hand, Jayda wasn't sure, but she wondered if her nails had bit into the skin.

Robert, for whatever reason, stepped forwards, fear receding in favour of something that looked like indignation. He froze when Yuriy called for Boris, confused, while Jayda, despite having the side of her face intimately acquainted with the carpet, couldn't quite suppress a the upwards twitch of an unpleasant smile.

The door on the opposite side of the hall opened, revealing a frighteningly happy looking Boris and a vaguely disgruntled Ivan. Robert jumped at their sudden appearance, and then paled when he finally got a good look at Boris despite his broken glasses.

"Hand it over." Boris said, grinning that vaguely shark-like grin of his. Ivan cursed impressively, taking a wad of cash out from his back pocket and slapping the bills into the taller man's open hand. Ignoring Robert for a moment, Boris leaned forward and tilted his head, just a little, to make proper eye contact with her and praised, "I'm making a ridiculous amount of money on you."

Oh, Boris, Jayda thought with sarcastically. Never change.

Sensing –incorrectly- that he wasn't in any immediate danger, Robert tried to inch away towards the stairwell –and Boris let him, waiting until the American had disappeared beyond the doors before turning and following. Ivan watched the burly Russian disappear behind those same doors before addressing Jayda. "Boris'll sort the prick out for you."

Suddenly, Jayda had the sneaking suspicion that the pair had been listening in from the other side of the door.

Ivan glanced away from her, probably at Yuriy, who she couldn't see from her position. After a moment, the shorter of the two nodded and then disappeared into his apartment.

Sniffling, eyes still itching and headache still forging on, Jayda shifted restlessly, and asked after a long moment of silence. "Can I get up now?"


	59. Umpteenth

**[Umpteenth]**

Yuriy was as quick to let her go as he was to restrain her, but as far as Jayda's nerves were concerned, he might as well have stayed put; phantoms his hands lingered in his wake. A cool draft from the open door ran chilled fingers across those her arms and she shivered, just a little.

Yuriy was already moving to close her front door as Jayda gingerly pushed herself to her feet and took a look at her hand. Her guess had been right –she had little fragments of glass embedded into her skin, and the cuts bled freely. A fat droplet of blood dripped onto the carpet as she tilted her hand for a better view of the injuries and curled her fingers. The sharp intake of breath that followed the tentative clenching of her fingers accompanied the discovery of the four deep half-crescent cuts along her palm.

Her sniffles and itchy eyes, at least, were beginning to go away. That was something, she supposed.

"Ow." She mumbled, uselessly, and she nearly jumped when Yuriy was suddenly beside her, grasping her wrist and turning her hand over and back. Wryly, she commented, "Okay, so now I know why I'm not supposed to hit people with glasses..."

Yuriy snorted and pulled her into her bathroom, flicking the lights on as he passed the threshold. Jayda told him where the first aid kit was, watching as he placed the red canvas bag on the counter top and then disappeared into the rest of her apartment. Distantly, she heard the fridge door open and close, followed by a quiet clinking of glass. Sighing, feeling drained from her earlier anger and struggling, the redhead woman leaned against the low bathroom vanity.

In a tiny, microscopic corner of her mind, Jayda almost regretted losing her temper like that. _Almost_. If she was lucky, maybe Robert wouldn't come back with an assault charge –though, admittedly, that was fairly unlikely now that Boris was involved. No one in their right mind would even contemplate showing up on Boris' doorstep with a warrant for his arrest. Jayda wagered that most of the people in their _wrong_ minds wouldn't dare, either.

With her undamaged hand, she turned on the tap and splashed a few handfuls of cold water onto her face, hoping to relieve the residual effects of those thrice-damned lilies. It helped, and by the time she was done drying her face on a nearby hand towel, Yuriy returned with a bottle of vodka, a glass, and what looked like a pair of forceps. The vodka was opened and a good portion of it was poured into the glass, followed by the forceps.

After the first aid kit had been opened, Jayda offered her bloodied hand compliantly and watched at the man began to work. He started by holding her arm out over the sink and pouring half of what was left of the vodka over her knuckles and palm, seeming immune to Jayda vicious cursing. Then the now-sterilized forceps were used to remove the thick glass fragments and then the thin splinters. Jayda spent most of that process clenching and unclenching her free hand and biting her tongue, eyes watering from the pain. The process wasn't as bad as getting stitches had been, at least, and Jayda had no problem suppressing any potential flinches.

Once all of the glass was out, at least by Yuriy's estimation, the remainder of the bottle of vodka was poured over her hand –chased by yet another bout of swearing- followed by what Jayda could only assume was some sort of antiseptic wipe from the kit. That stung only slightly less than the vodka, but it was probably better than getting an infection. When she raised her undamaged hand to wipe at her eyes, Yuriy paused, glancing at her with those eerie white-blue eyes of his.

"Stings." She said by way of explanation, blinking rapidly to try and clear her vision. Yuriy nodded and resumed his work.

Her knuckles had stopped bleeding quite so freely and the cuts along her palm were beginning to follow suit when Yuriy finally got to bandaging her hand.

"That was unnecessary." The Russian disapproved as he wrapped the bandage around her hand a few times, one hand holding the roll of sterile fabric while the other maintained a loose grip on her wrist. The pad of his thumb rested lightly on the dip in the heel of her palm, where the fleshy part of the thumb connected to the wrist. When a rivulet of blood slipped down towards that same dip, the almost mechanical sweep of that same calloused pad that smeared red over the thin skin of the flesh of her thumb sent a tiny jolt up her arm and down her spine.

The sensation was... odd; she'd never thought her of wrists as particularly sensitive before...

Jayda returned to the present and scowled at the man who stood only a little over hand-span away from her. "You weren't the one referred to as _turf_, okay? I thought it was entirely necessary."

Yuriy didn't respond as he tied the bandage off and put the first-aid supplies back into the little red kit, which could mean any of three things: he agreed, he thoroughly disagreed, or he didn't care either way. Jayda was betting on one of the former two, herself. Whatever the case, she sure as hell wasn't going to apologize for punching Robert -even if she got in trouble for it, it had absolutely been worth the bloodied hand.

Slipping her hand from the Russian's grasp, Jayda flexed her fingers gently, noting the improvement in both mobility and pain now that the glass had been taken care of. The bandages were secure, too, and not likely to loosen or slip off when she wasn't paying attention. One of these days, Jayda thought ruefully, Yuriy wouldn't have to patch her up every other time she turned around.

A grimace, regret, tugged at her features momentarily before her furrowed brow smoothed out and she moved to thank Yuriy for helping her sorry self for the umpteenth time.

God only knew why he kept doing it, because basic physical attraction wasn't nearly enough to justify half of what the man had done for her, but she was thankful.


	60. Schrodinger

**[Schrodinger]**

They stayed as they were while Yuriy tucked the repacked first aid kit away and cleaned her blood from his fingertips, her leaning back against the smooth off-white counter and him close beside her. The only sounds in the room came from the faucet, a quiet trickling of water magnified by the room's acoustics, and the ever-present electric hum of the fluorescent light bulbs above. Faintly, the sounds of Moscow's nightlife drifted in, little more than a muted din of car horns, distant chattering voices, and the rush of wheels on tarmac.

Sometimes, Jayda thought as she watched the water run pink against the white ceramic of her sink, it felt like their silences revealed more than their actual conversations did –though what, exactly, was revealed, the Canadian had yet to figure out. Comfort, maybe. Trust, too, but that was a given at this point. It was... well, it just _was_. There was nothing else to say. Besides, hadn't she just promised herself earlier to stop questioning things?

A sharp twinge of pain low in her abdomen heralded the next wave of cramps as Jayda was perusing Yuriy's handiwork. She habitually pressed the fingertips of her undamaged hand into the soft tissue beside the sharp bone of her left pelvis, (that mutinous ovary was acting up again) more to distract herself than as a measure to relieve the pain.

Catching movement in her peripheral vision, the redheaded woman glanced up. Pale eyes were focused on the hand at her hip, head tilted to the side in what was probably the closest thing to open curiosity that Jayda had seen from the man. The rest of his face remained carefully blank.

"That helps?" Clearly sceptical, the Russian shifted his weight slightly to one side.

Pulling her hand away and running it through her hair –mussed from her earlier flailing and struggling- she felt awkward and suddenly irrationally self-conscious. The man had seen her in worse states, but suddenly her spaghetti strap shirt seemed too thin and too low-cut while her pyjama bottoms felt like they sat too low on her hips. It was stupid, and there was no reason for it (_there were a hundred reasons for it_) but there it was.

At length, Jayda shrugged noncommittally and mumbled, "A little."

Yuriy frowned, eyes tracking the movement of her hand through her hair before settling on her face. "Painkillers would be more effective."

Another sharp twinge caught her off guard and she grimaced again, hand returning to apply pressure to the soft inside of her hip. Yuriy's eyes tracked that, too, puzzlement mingled with deliberation while Jayda shook her head, shifting so that she wasn't leaning on the counter anymore. The linoleum creaked faintly beneath her bare feet.

"Doesn't really make much of a difference."

Pale, faintly curious eyes took on a that familiar calculating glint for a moment –just a moment- and the Canadian knew that that particular bit of information had been stored away for review, but he didn't ask. He never asked. Jayda knew he'd wait and collect fragments of information until she told him what, exactly, her condition was –or he figured it out for himself.

She kind of loved that.

Jayda was only half as surprised as she probably could have been when Yuriy's hand brushed against the top of her thigh, fingertips sliding under and then dislodging her hand. Her hand hovered above his wrist, uncertain, while her pulse jumped and the vaguely uncomfortable sensation of feeling one's own pupils dilating was visited upon Jayda once again. The pad of his thumb pressed firmly against the same spot she had pinpointed and ran upwards along the sharp line of her pelvis, across the thin strip of exposed midriff. The digit stopped at the hem of her shirt and lingered for a moment. When the pathway was reversed, there was no disguising the telling clench of her abdominal muscles –half conscious thought, half instinct-or the twitch of her hovering fingers.

Startled, (though she couldn't say if that was because of his actions or her own reactions) her eyes flickered up to find him already watching her, head bowed slightly and eyelids at half-mast. For once, his stare was not calculating or sharp, but something new lurked behind those eerie pale eyes –something she couldn't quite name. Whatever that look was, she felt her face begin to flush in response and silently damned her pasty complexion.

There was a pregnant pause, deeper than the silence that had swept in before. It left Yuriy watching and waiting to see what she would do and Jayda trying to figure out if half of the ideas running through her mind were viable options. At some point, a few inches of the space between them had evaporated. Not too much, though –Yuriy was following the same pattern as before, more or less- but enough to start to muddle Jayda's thought processes a bit. Still, a few thoughts came through with startling clarity, most stemming from the conversation, short as it had been, they'd had prior to Robert's appearance.

First: Yuriy didn't seem operate like most guys. He didn't flirt, praise, or shower with gifts –and that was just fine with Jayda, because every other relationship like that usually ended in disaster.

Second: Yuriy was not an affectionate man. He was aloof, calculating, and detached from much of the world and its ten thousand little grievances. Very little of what he did was done carelessly or without consideration; the fact that he bothered to show any form of obvious interest was _big_.

...But trailing after the clattering and clamouring of those two thoughts was the quiet internal murmur that Jayda was _tired_. She was tired of uncertainty, of feeling vulnerable and just _waiting_ for something to happen instead of taking action.

She had too much of that in her life, and most of that was completely out of her control. It seemed like every time she turned around, some new misfortune was visited upon her, or some new thing just suddenly went wrong. When was the last time something had gone _right_?

_This_, though -this thing, this strange, terrifying thing between them? That she could do something about.

It was simple, really –Schrodinger's cat as a metaphor; either the cat was alive or it was dead, and the only way to find out was to man up, open the stupid box, and _look_.

Except it wasn't that simple at all, because Jayda had never done that before –had never worked up the courage to be the initiator, had never needed to- and there was a silent, nauseating fear that if she did anything wrong, she'd find herself alienated and alone.

Yet another 'what if' in a long line of doubt and insecurity –disgust curled in the back of her throat, and she decided then that maybe, just maybe, it was time to be brave.

Without even realizing it, the hand that had been hovering above Yuriy's wrist had lowered until the pads of her fingers and the tips of her nails contacted skin. The touch surprised Jayda, half made her want to recoil and flee in what she was ashamed to call cowardice, but she didn't. Some unknown impulse drove her onwards, tracing the line of a prominent tendon from knuckle to wrist, and then sliding along the radius of his forearm through the fabric of his shirt. She watched the dilation of his pupils, the intensification of that look that she couldn't identify, as her hand skimmed across the hard curve of triceps and deltoid and reached the softer underside of his collarbone. The man's expression merely shifted from blank to something that might almost be intrigue, but Jayda felt the telling tremor of the muscles beneath her fingers.

...Not exactly active encouragement, but close enough. Jayda shifted forward, away from the counter, and curled her right hand, red specks of blood stark amongst the white bandages, around his left bicep. The muscle was corded and hard under her hand but not overdone, though the woman suspected that he possessed the wiry sort of strength (as opposed to bulk and a low centre of gravity that Boris had) that caught people off guard.

Jayda felt some of that strength first-hand when Yuriy's hand fitted itself to her other hip, fingers just shy of painful in their grip, and pulled her forward. She slipped the hand at his collar over his shoulder, nails tracing the lines of his neck. There was little more than a hair's breadth between them, breaths mingling without synchronicity as their foreheads pressed together, a faint trace of vodka and coffee in the air. Noses just barely brushing, Jayda's lips parted and she was paying too much attention to Yuriy's own thin, downturned lips to catch the hooded, nearly predatory slant of his eyes. What Canadian _did_ notice was the way the air grew thick and too warm, and the hammering of her own pulse, and the slow unfurling of something liquid and electric at the base of her hips. Her eyelids slid to half-mast.

It was the Canadian who moved first, angling her head to tentatively brush her lips against his own –light, uncertain touches, but each one was like an electric jolt down her spine. His lips were slightly chapped against hers, though the texture wasn't unpleasant, and Jayda grew bold enough to try a firmer kiss. She had to shift her weight to the balls of her feet to compensate for his height, but the angle was a little more awkward as she'd anticipated.

Problems only arose when Jayda realized that Yuriy wasn't responding. At all. The man had gone completely still, and with a sudden stab of doubt and confusion, Jayda withdrew, losing all of her nerve. Mortification arrived soon afterwards –oh, god, had she _misunderstood_? Her stomach curled in on itself with dread and chagrin as she glanced up at his eyes. The Canadian caught a spark of something there behind those hooded white-blue eyes and that was all the warning she had.

Jayda barely had time to register her initial surprise before she found herself lifted bodily onto the counter and held flush from hip to chest with the Russian. Her arms slipped around his shoulders automatically, felt them tense just fractionally before relaxing. The insides of her thighs pressed against the man's much narrower hips, and the heat between them contrasted sharply with the cold of the counter beneath her; the Canadian shivered, pressing closer, and felt a responsive clench of the muscles against her belly. The sensation sent a shock of something sharp and electric right to the base of her spine, amplifying the slow pressure building there. Now eye to eye with him, Jayda watched Yuriy's pupils dilate further with the contact and take on a dark sort of look; the slow burn of embers in the dark.

The kiss was as sudden as it was hard, offset only by the relative gentleness with which one of his hands threaded into the tangled mane of her hair and curled around the base of her skull –and, when the shock wore off, Jayda gave as good as she got. His free hand drifted from her hip to the curve of her ribs, his thumb tracing the outline of her underwire through the fabric of her shirt.

Out in the hallway, Margit had heard the earlier disturbance and, like any self-respecting nosy biddy, had gone to investigate once things had died down. Finding Jayda's door closed but curiously unlocked, the aging grandmother had popped in to see if the young woman was safe and sound. She didn't know who that Robert fellow was, but he'd caused quite the ruckus and Margit was sure that the young Canadian would need a maternal shoulder to lean on in her time of distress –and, of course, Margit was just _dying_ to have something gossip to her friends about at the hairdresser's.

Hearing a muffled commotion from the direction of what Margit assumed was the bathroom, she shuffled over and inquired, "Jayda, dear, are you alright?"


	61. Chemistry

Hey guys! Before we get started, I'd like to apologize for the delay in updates and thank all of you guys for your fantastic and flattering reviews! Enjoy!

* * *

**[Chemistry]**

At some point, things had gotten a bit turned around.

Rather, Jayda corrected, _she'd_ gotten a bit turned around. Somehow –and the Canadian would never know _how_- Yuriy had realized that the back of her neck was a prime target. So far as her muddled brain could tell, that had happened some time after the hickey-turned-bite-mark on her shoulder and a little bit before she'd been disentangled from the taller Russian, set back on her own two feet, and spun around to face away from the man.

Quite when her bra –strapless, lacy, acid green; hard to miss in the bleak bathroom- had disappeared, however, was a complete mystery to Jayda, and at that _precise_ point in time, she couldn't really bring herself to care.

The curved edge of the countertop dug into the sharp bones of her hips painfully, pinned as they were between polished stone at her front and a wall of hard muscle at her back; a grimace and a failed attempt at bucking saw the pressure eased until it was bearable (even here, there was room for negotiation, if she was quick.) Jayda had one hand –the injured one- pressed flat against the mirror to support her, more to keep her from bowing forward than anything, but found that when a cool hand slipped under her shirt and began to explore, the outstretched limb became more and more pivotal to keeping her upright.

Long fingers twisted into her mussed hair, keeping the mass of it away and pulling –firmly, but not painfully- her head slightly forward to one side, elongating back and one side of her exposed neck. The Canadian didn't bother to even try to suppress the rolling shiver that rushed from the base of her neck to the tips of her toes as hot breath ghosted over the hypersensitive skin below her hairline, or the instinctive mirroring of the clench of muscles at her back. She felt the brush of lips, the scrape of teeth, along the vertebrae below her hairline, lightly at first and then more firmly. Knees wobbled; someone -probably her -moaned. Her free, undamaged hand clenched into a white-knuckled fist against the counter top for want of something to did her nails into.

And then he stopped.

Confused, –surprised that her brain was functioning enough for her to even _be _confused- grey eyes glanced up at the mirror and this time Jayda would have had to be blind to miss the predatory slant of hooded eyes, or the thin, one-sided smirk that exposed sharp incisors and a pointed canine. Yuriy's lower lip was bloody –he had surprised her at the wrong moment and she had bitten down a little too hard. Her own face was flush, lips puffy and bitten, and the mark on her shoulder –exposed, the thin strap of her shirt hanging off her shoulder uselessly- was already colouring impressively. Jayda saw a thin line of blood meandering over her collarbone, heading for the path of least resistance over the slope one breast to the valley between. She hadn't realized he'd bitten her hard enough to draw blood.

The idea didn't bother her as much as she thought it should.

Jayda shifted uncomfortably, suddenly aware of the low, throbbing _want_, of the thousands of tiny electric tingles at every single point of contact; the slow pressure at the base of her spine had changed to something molten and unfurling.

A frail, wavering voice broke the moment with a breathless, "Oh _my_."

* * *

The scene beyond the open doorway was not quite what the frail old woman had expected. In fact, the scene left her gaping. Jayda was frozen, staring at Margit with a look not unlike she'd been caught with her hand in the cookie jar -and in a most compromising position, too!

Yuriy, on the other hand, seemed largely unconcerned by the old woman's intrusion. His face was impassive –except, Margit noted with surprisingly sharp eyes, for the faintest hint of annoyance. He would like very much for her to turn around and leave, the old woman knew, but Margit trusted Valkovich only as far as she could throw him (less than that, even) and with her frail old bones, that wasn't much.

Besides, she liked Jayda, in that gossip-mongering way of her, and Margit Anja Petrovich _always_ looked after the people she liked.

"Shame on you!" The grandmother began, frail voice taking on a surprisingly harsh and scolding tone. She was shaking a gnarled finger at Yuriy, and Jayda had to fight to suppress a laugh at the picture they all made, even if she was mortified by it. "Taking advantage of the poor girl when she's in distress!"

Was she _joking_?

The Canadian turned her head to glance at Yuriy –the grip on her hair had loosened upon Margit's untimely arrival- and asked dryly, "You didn't lock the door? ... What was the point in updating my entire security system again?"

Yuriy snorted, but made no move to withdraw from his position under the frail old woman's glare; if anything, the hand under Jayda's shirt resumed its slow perusal; the Canadian bit her lip as the Russian leaned closer to murmur, "I didn't anticipate the _babushka _sticking her nose where it doesn't belong."

Margit sputtered, half in shock and half in outrage. Doubly so, when Yuriy grew bored with this standoff and turned his attention to Jayda's exposed (_vulnerable_) neck; Jayda's eyes glazed over, lips parting with an entirely involuntary gasp.

The old woman was favoured with a particularly frosty stare, one that silently but strongly suggested that the crone disappear before Yuriy decided he had half a mind to _make_ her leave.

Wisely, Margit retreated –and immediately went in search of a fan and a door with a sturdy lock.

No one could say that Margit hadn't tried –but if the girl was going to take up with _that_ lot (more so than she already did, anyway) then count Margit out. Margit may have survived two World Wars, but she wasn't about to push her luck; the Canadian was on her own.

... The old woman just hoped that Jayda knew what she was doing.


	62. Fixation

**[Fixation]**

Fingertips –gloved, always gloved, just in case- traced the curve of her cheek, the photo crisp and glossy in his hands. The angle was awkward, peering through the barred windows of her apartment. He hadn't been happy about those upgrades –they would complicate things- but he forgave her; she was perfect.

Or, rather, she would be perfect.

He hadn't expected this –hadn't expected to find himself fascinated one of his Chosen. That complicated things. Should he take her anyway? Perhaps. Or perhaps he should leave her –keep her to himself. The Other would never know. The Other wouldn't understand, anyway; too stupid and too coarse, inept at pretending otherwise. She was a fine thing, soft edges with a sharp tongue; the sort of thing one handled with care and precision. The Other would break her, bruise her, in all the wrong ways.

At last, he understood his father's fixation with one of his subjects; he had found his favourite, too.

But she was making _mistakes_. She was too close to the remains of the last generation of Chosen –his father's pet projects. They were failures, the last generation; the therapy didn't stick, the drugs made them violent and unpredictable; too strong to break, too weak to handle the treatment. Damaged things, fractured things. _Fragile_.

She would be strong. Not at first, of course –but he would make her strong, and then the others would fall in line. The groups needed a leader, an Alpha. She would serve.

... But if he was going to take her, it would have to be soon –before they damaged her too. He didn't think he could stand it if they did.

She _would_ be perfect.

Dull, clinical eyes swept over the other fifteen Chosen; whimpering, bleeding, weak. She was not like those imperfect things, though they were useful. Now that he had refined his criteria, the data he had gathered was much more interesting. He no longer had the need to go through subject after subject and then dispose of them like so much trash; these, he would keep, until they were ready. His father's work had been good, but he would refine it –make it irrefutable. Then the others, the ones that had laughed and mocked and thrown his father out of the medical community with such horrible names –he would make them see. He would finish his father's work.

Then, he could get rid of the other Chosen. And the Other, too. They would no longer be necessary.

He might keep _her_, though.

Still, the other Chosen were necessary for the time being. His father had made only one mistake –he had set them in quads. _He_ knew better, though. Larger groups were required –they were more dynamic, would bond better once broken. Would rebuild together.

The last generation was smart, though –they knew his tricks, his father's tricks. They knew what to watch for.

That was alright. The Other had a few tricks of his own.


	63. Fractured Fairytales

**[Fractured Fairytales]**

Jayda had always known that Yuriy was a little mercurial, but she was still dumbfounded when the Russian's mood abruptly became more withdrawn after Margit's departure. Not hurt –but definitely baffled. Even now, the look in his eyes wasn't quite as cool and calculating as it usually was –still marred with heat and dilated pupils whenever he glanced in her direction- but any and all physical contact had disappeared entirely. They were back to sitting at opposite ends of the couch and watching each other silently, her wondering if she should say something (wondering what the hell she _could_ say when, mostly, she really just wanted to jump the moody git's bones) and he as unreadable as ever.

It wasn't that he didn't want her, that much the Canadian was sure of. If he wasn't interested, he wouldn't be there –would never have so much as brushed against her accidentally. Also, that sort of _interest_ was hard to hide when you were flush against someone.

Whatever the reason for the Russian's withdrawal was, Jayda couldn't fathom it. At best, she figured he wasn't fond of constant physical contact. It made sense, in a way; she'd never seen him have much contact with any of his roommates, and all of his previous contact with her had been minimal and short-lived –tonight, by those standards, had been excessive. If the pale-eyed Russian was as introverted as she thought, he needed recovery time.

Fine by her –too much more in that vein, and she might very well have done something stupid. Not her regular kind of stupid, either, but the too-much-too-soon-I've-ruined-everything sort of stupid.

It was strange, though. Jayda normally had such self-control, to the point where past boyfriends had implied that she was frigid, maybe even asexual. Not so now, the Canadian thought ironically. Why was that?

Wonderingly, she looked over at the Russian –_really_ looked- and took in the straight nose and the thin, downturned lips; the shape and shade of the hooded eyes under a smooth, straight brow and the angles of sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw. Angles dominated his form, long-limbed and wiry; he was leaner than Jayda's usual type –stronger too- and entirely unlike anyone she'd ever met. Still, he... reminded her of something –something that was dangerous even when contained, vicious when threatened, but cool and calm in its own territory.

Unbidden, the tale of Little Red Riding Hood came to mind, and Jayda smiled wryly. Not quite accurate, but... fitting, in a twisted sort of way.

His smooth, lazy drawl drew her out of her thought processes. Yuriy was watching her with that not-quite-open curiosity, head tilted just fractionally to one side. "What are you thinking about?"

"Folk tales." She answered, smile broadening slightly.

The Russian reached out, silent, and long fingers just barely brushed the underside of her jaw, following the line of the bone there and then wandering, feather-light, down the length of her neck to the hollow of her throat. Calloused fingertips paused for a long moment, noting the even rhythm of her heartbeat and the strength of her pulse before he withdrew from her once more. Jayda didn't know what that gesture was supposed to mean, didn't dare to even guess, but she offered a small, tired smile nonetheless.

It was four in the morning, still dark in the beginnings of Russia's winter season, and the sounds of Moscow's nightlife were finally mute.

Yuriy left at quarter past as wordlessly as he'd come, but for all that Jayda was fatigued, she did not sleep.


	64. The Little Things

**[The Little Things]**

Russia's winter season was surprisingly not unlike winters in Ontario, Canada –the province she'd been born in. That surprised Jayda, in a way –she'd expected the end of the year in Moscow to be at least twice as miserable. Where she had expected a damp, bone-deep cold she found instead a more tolerable dry cold; where she had expected constant snowfall and ice and slush, she found periods of reprieve and very little rainfall thrown into the mix.

What Jayda hadn't expected was sudden, vicious storm that smothered the city and cut the power with a quickness that had surprised the Canadian, used to turbulent West Coast weather as she was. The weather outside was well below zero –obscenely, even- and with the power and heating off, Jayda was beginning to feel it.

When the front door swung open, bringing with it a flood of rapid, irritable Russian in a familiar nasally voice, interspersed with a smooth drawl or a curt growl, Jayda couldn't quiet suppress a wry smile. She had planned on invading their apartment soon, but they quartet had beaten her to the punch, as it were.

"Hey guys," She greeted from the living room. She was using what was left of the dim daylight to place and light candles –tall, pale, unscented- around her apartment. She made a point of placing the candles in sensible places, as opposed to beside the drapes or on the floor. Vaguely, she recalled a past roommate who had had no such sensibilities and had nearly set the entire their condo on fire.

"We brought booze." Ivan announced unnecessarily from the entranceway. Of course they did; the Canadian spent most of their Biweekly Drinking Nights together worrying about the states of her boys' livers and kidneys.

"And I have rapidly cooling pizza in the oven!" Jayda returned. She moved to greet the Russians as they inevitably drifted towards her kitchen, and found herself leaning her shoulder, arms loosely folded, against the empty doorframe of the kitchen. She'd made the pizza herself –the boxed stuff was alright, but hers was better- shortly before the power outage. Figuring she'd have a tribute for her moody Russians if she visited later, she'd popped it back into the still-warm oven to keep it relatively edible.

Ivan nodded and gave a sloppy, haphazard salute as he approached, followed closely by Boris, who only spared her a startlingly piercing glance and a dismissive blink. Unfazed, Jayda turned her body so the shorter members of the quartet could pass. Sergei came next, lifting a heavy, calloused hand to pat the top of her head as he walked by –a lavish display of affection as far as the laconic bear of a man was concerned. Yuriy lingered in the entryway, watching.

"Why am I not surprised that you have a bucket load of girly fucking candles?" Ivan began his nightly bout of scathing mockery without any further ado. The Canadian opted to view the process as Ivan's way of asking her how she'd been lately.

"Functional candles." Jayda corrected as she moseyed pivoted to face into the kitchen, keeping her post at the archway. Ivan snagged a bottle from Boris' grasp and tossed it over to her; Jayda's fingers slipped a little on the condensation on the glass bottle's smooth surface, but she kept her grip on it nonetheless. The burly man, meanwhile, scowled but did nothing otherwise. "Girly candles would be smelly and colourful. Also, girly candles give me headaches."

"Why do you have so many, anyway?" Ivan wanted to know, ignoring her.

Jayda considered her answer for a moment before shrugging as she opened her bottle of vodka and took a swig. "Well, my dad used to say 'Why sit in the dark when you can burn a monastery?' and back in Canada we had _loads_ of storms throughout the year, so..."

The Canadian trailed off and shrugged again.

"Because _that_ makes sense." Ivan agreed sarcastically. Jayda smiled.

Jayda felt eyes raking down the curve of her back and over the set of her shoulders and knew that Yuriy was approaching. The ghosting trail of fingertips at the small of her back was hidden from the others as he stepped past her; clever angling, poor lighting, and plausible coincidence worked in his favour.

Jayda tried to quash the shiver that crawled up her spine with electric tingles and, for the most part, failed entirely. If Ivan, Boris, or Sergei noticed the momentary glazing of her eyes or the way she shifted twitchily, they said nothing.

At length, the pizza was brought out of the oven, (miraculously still warm) the drinking officially commenced, and –between the company and the alcohol- the cold became a distant concern. The five of them talked, sporadically –more to break the silence than anything- gradually working their way through the Russians' alcohol and delving into the Canadian's stash.

In many ways, it was a reversion to the earlier stages of their relationship –drinking and sitting in relative silence- but Jayda noticed the subtle differences between then and now; the looseness of the boys' stances, the way they spoke to her, the casual way they'd alternately pour her a drink or toss a bottle to her.

It was the little things that told her how comfortable they were with her.


	65. Capricious

**[Capricious]**

This textbook was giving her a headache. Jayda was fairly certain she wasn't absorbing any of it, either –between Yuriy being his usual distracting self and the fact that she'd been staring at the same page for over an hour, the redhead had accomplished next to nothing.

Maybe, the Canadian conceded after a moment, it was time to acknowledge defeat. Closing the hardcover psychology textbook and dropping it onto the carpeted floor carelessly, Jayda massaged her forehead. She'd been getting an abnormal number of headaches recently –stress, perhaps? Either way, it was playing hell with her studying. She had exams coming up.

Yuriy, on the other end of the couch, glanced up from his laptop.

"I can't focus on any of this right now." Jayda lamented with a sigh, rubbing absent-mindedly at a crick in the back of her neck. She's been sitting parallel to the back of the couch, leaning against the cushy armrest; the strain hadn't helped her neck in the slightest. "Thank god I memorized most of it weeks ago anyway."

Her eyes closed as she shimmed until she was half-sitting and half-lying down, a sort of exaggerated slouch with her legs drawn up and bent at the knee to leave room for Yuriy. She twitched in surprise, just faintly, as calloused fingertips traced the curve of her calf –bare; she was wearing loose cotton Capri's- and the sharp line of her shin.

She cracked an eyelid open and found Yuriy focused on his laptop, typing one-handed while his other lightly traced meaningless patterns along her leg. His attention wasn't really on whatever he was working on; it showed in the way the rapid tapping against his keyboard had slowed almost to a halt. Irrationally, Jayda thought he should be wearing glasses –wire-framed, maybe. Something that wouldn't detract from his eyes.

The idea seemed terribly appealing, but something told her she wouldn't be able to talk the practical man into getting a pair for her own personal amusement.

Pity. The redhead closed her eyes again.

His hand crept a little too far up the inside of her thigh. Jayda swatted without giving the action much consideration –it was more of a tap than a real swat, anyway. The hand withdrew, and after several long moments she heard the laptop quietly click shut from the other side of the couch. When she felt his weight shift on the other side of the couch, the Canadian idly wondered if he'd retaliate. He might. Then again he might not.

Yuriy was a little unpredictable like that.

Whatever the Canadian anticipated, she was still caught completely off-guard when a pair of hands seized her hips and dragged her along the couch –startled enough to give an undignified squeak, even as she opened her eyes and found her view of the ceiling obscured by white-blue eyes and a shock of dark red hair. His face was expressionless –not unusual- but it was the look in his eyes that gave him away; a bright spark that was halfway between playful and dangerous.

Even now, contact was kept to a minimum, the majority of his body held up and away from her by the hand beside her head; his other hand was still gripped her hip, the knee between her legs brushed the inside of her thigh just above the knee while the other pressed against the outside. Her one leg, the one with his hand at her hip, was still raised, bent at the knee and just barely held away from him; her muscles –strong; she'd always had strong legs, a runner's legs- flexed as his hand shifted from her hip to curve around the outside of her thigh, a response to a largely involuntary wiggle on her part. Her hands, raised instinctively in her defence, hovered uncertainly in the air, slowly gravitating towards his shoulders. The muscles under her hands didn't tense this time upon contact –it was with a quiet shock that she remembered that he _had _tensed the first time- and Jayda let her fingertips peruse the lines of his neck and jaw, silently amused at the beginnings of stubble she found there.

The tip of his nose brushed faintly against her temple, nudged just slightly at the corner of her jaw. Shifting, more out of a reaction to the warm flush she felt or the slight stutter in her heart beat, Jayda tilted her jaw upwards a little in response to the non-suggestion. If her breathing hitched, just a bit, as lips ghosted over the vulnerable stretch of skin and ligaments, pausing over the carotid artery and then scraping sharp teeth over the curve of her collarbone beside the hollow of her throat –well, she hoped he wouldn't comment. And he didn't –but that was to be expected; the four were all varying degrees of taciturn even on a good day, after all.

Withdrawing, Yuriy stared down at her, eyes a little less calculating and a little more curious now. He took in the faint flush of her face, the dilation of her pupils, and her not quite even breathing with an air that too intense to be clinical, but too distant to be immediate interest. His free hand left her thigh to push the collar of her shirt to one side, just far enough to take a look at the bite mark from several days before. It had bruised, but not badly, and the punctures had healed cleanly. A calloused fingertip traced the curve of the bite slowly, speculatively...

And then, suddenly, he was up and on the other side of the room –in the kitchen- helping himself to a mug of coffee.

Jayda raised her head to stare at him with something between confusion and annoyed disbelief. How did he go from –from _that_, to suddenly wanting a coffee?

Changeable bastard.


	66. Watchman

**A/N:** Sorry for the ridiculous delay! Life tried to kill me and nearly succeeded!

* * *

**[Watchman]**

Yuriy didn't like people, never had. It wasn't in his nature. It wasn't in any of their natures. They were a well-oiled machine, he, Boris, Ivan, and Sergei. They'd never had any need for another member, another pack-mate. Anyone who might have tried to enter their circle was quickly deterred.

That was the way it had always been between them.

And then Jayda happened.

It was unfathomable, how she had worked her way into their lives as surely as if she'd always been there. And he let her.

This was good, he'd thought. This was what the psychiatrists and counselors had told them to do; meet new people, integrate new ideas into their routines. Maybe that was why they had tolerated her, initially.

Not so now, though… No, not at all. They no longer tolerated the Canadian – they _welcomed_ her. Yuriy had never felt his following to be unbalanced before, had never seen a fault in how they did things or why. Jayda had introduced an equalizing effect upon the group, had witnessed their strangeness, their hostility and anti-social behaviours, and had not judged them or even feared them for it.

Amazing, given that Boris could have killed her that day, in the darkened hallway, without so much as a thought for the hapless girl, or guilt, or consequences.

Yuriy was… pleased, almost, that his companion had refrained. He was unused to the sensation, had had very little to be glad for or of in the past, but he was pleased nonetheless.

She fascinated him.

That, he mused, was not necessarily a good thing at all.

Yuriy had always known he was different, had always sensed it. It wasn't enough to want, to have. It wasn't enough to have a woman like Jayda, to keep her close. Some feral part of him wanted more, wanted to crawl inside her skin and _be_ her, and _have_ her as no one else would – to hold her close enough to grind their very bones together. It wanted to hurt her, to see her skin split under the tapered edge of a blade, to taste her blood and sex and _consume _her, and it wanted to tend those very wounds and wallow in the trust she gave him. It was a thing without reason or logic, and it had haunted him ever since he was old enough to comprehend it.

Yes. Yuriy had always known he was different. He had known, and had developed his self-control to prevent all of those things from happening at a very early age, even before…

_Before_ didn't bear contemplating.

His self-control had never wavered, in those years. He had never before encountered something which made him _want_ to waver. Jayda did all of that and more, and it left him with the unsettling task of wrestling that aspect of himself back under control.

He could not tolerate hurting her – she inflicted her own foolish injuries upon herself enough for both of them- but oh, how that malignant part of his mind _wanted_ to.

The white-eyed Russian tested himself, daily, and forced himself to endure the impulses, the near-compulsions to touch and take and take. He endured it when she was with him, and he endured it when she was not.

He would never assault her, would never sink to rape, but that was not the problem. She was willing, was eager even, to continue further into the realm of the physical so soon… Yuriy was not. Such a thing would not be wise.

When the redheaded woman's home had been violated, that primal part of himself had –for the first time in his life- joined forces with his rational side in its fury. Someone had gone where he had forced himself to refrain from treading, and the theft of such a thing from him sparked something cold and sharp and dark in Yuriy. The possessiveness was more than just that – it was a bay for blood for the violation of a territory, a dark rage that Jayda had glimpsed only briefly.

Such an intrusion could not be permitted again. It had been agreed upon, by all of them.

Jayda was not to know, would not understand.

And so, every night, Yuriy tested his control further and slipped into her dark and silent apartment, the locks opening silently under his fingers and the alarm's post-deactivation chirp hardly disturbing the sleeping woman. He checked the possible points of entry into her home, observed the surrounding areas to see what, if anything, had been disturbed. Like clockwork, he silently and meticulously worked his way through Jayda's apartment every night until he thought he might be as familiar with it as she was.

Lastly, always lastly, he checked her bedroom. He never entered it, more out of politeness than fear of losing control of himself, but keen eyes observed the darkened room and its occupant carefully before he silently shut the door and retreated to his own bed.

On the nights he was absent, Boris replaced him, equally as silent and thorough. Yuriy trusted Boris' own psychopathy to limit itself to those _outside_ the pack.

Jayda was not to know.

…And yet, as Yuriy stood at the threshold of her bedroom on one such night, he wondered if he might, just once…

Her voice, tired and confused, cut through the silence like a bolt of lightning. "…Yuriy?"


End file.
